Forum OpenACS Q&A: Rebooting a system using daemontools and Oracle

There has always been a problem with rebooting a system with a running Oracle-based ACS site;  the database doesn't shut down because the web server user is still logged in.  I have traditionally solved this problem by starting nsd from inittab and having it active only at run levels 3 and 4;  Oracle shuts down at level 2, so the web server user is already gone at that point and things can proceed smoothly.

This doesn't seem to be working properly on a system that uses daemontools intead of inittab.  I don't know exactly what the problem is, as I haven't seen it for myself yet, but I'm guessing that nsd is still running when Oracle tries to shut down.

Has anyone else had this problem, and if so, did you figure out a solution?  I'm assuming I can't just mess with the levels that svscanboot runs at, since DJB's software is not usually intended to be user-tweaked. :)  I've looked at the daemontools docs but didn't see anything about specifying run levels there.

Janine, you need to kill stuff running in /service. One failing of daemontools is shutting down stuff in order, and starting up in order. I have an init.d script for this situation:

#! /bin/sh

# chkconfig: 345 99 01
# description: svc start and kill all

# This is an example of a start/stop script for SysV-style init, such
# as is used on Linux systems.  You should edit some of the variables
# and maybe the 'echo' commands.
#
# add to starup via:
# chkconfig --add svc
#


touch /tmp/running_svc

# The path that is to be used for the script
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# What to use to start up the postmaster
DAEMON="/usr/local/bin/svc"


# Only start if we can find svc.
test -f $DAEMON || exit 0

# Parse command line parameters.
case $1 in
   start)
         echo "Starting All SVC Daemons:"
         $DAEMON -u /service/*
         touch /var/lock/subsys/svc
         echo "ok"
         ;;
   stop)
         echo -n "Stopping All SVC Daemons: "
         svc -d /service/*
         rm -f /var/lock/subsys/svc
         echo "ok"
         ;;
   restart)
         echo -n "Restarting All SVC Daemons: "
         $0 stop
         $0 start
         echo "ok"
         ;;
   status)
         svstat /service/*
         ;;
   *)
         # Print help
         echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status}" 1>&2
         exit 1
         ;;
esac

exit 0

It's heavy handed I know, you could adjust as needed, and maybe move the touched lock file to a better location.

Shoot, I should read my own script. Just remove the line:

touch /tmp/running_svc

That is a debug command I stuck in there and forgot to remove. The lock file is where it is supposed to be.

Thanks, Tom and Guan.  I guess I figured things would be more elegant under daemontools, but wth.  This looks like a good solution.

Dirk, if I had to I would go ahead and crash Oracle, but since I don't have to, I'd rather not take the risk.  Or, to be precise, the Oracle DBA I'm working with on this would not like to take the risk;  he's fairly conservative, as such folks tend to be.  It's his job. :)

As to what shutdown immediate|abort|transactional do, look here: http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/A87860_01/doc/server.817/a76956/start.htm#6370

And immediate may take a lot of time - depending on how long the longest rollback will take. Someone on the Oracle newsgroup posted that he once waited 6 hours.

FYI for anyone else working on this:

Tom's script didn't stop qmail.  I don't understand quite why, it could be a problem with our installation, but I'm not going to sweat it.  Adding /var/qmail/bin/qmailctl stop|start to the appropriate sections solved the problem.