Making this stuff work correctly is not that difficult. See the April
2003
"
Oracle /etc/init.d scripts should use shutdown immediate"
thread for more info, bugfixes to the Oracle 8.1.7 dbshut script, etc.
Dirk has a good point about the 6 hour rollback, but if you should
probably never have huge massive update transactions like
that going during normal operations for any OLTP-style application
like OpenACS anyway. If you do have huge data warehouse style updates
going on somewhere, you'll probably want that stuff in a different
Oracle instance anyway. AKA, the possibility of a 6 hour Oracle
rollback is indeed very real and worth thinking about, but I don't
think it would ever happen during normal operations of any stock
OpenACS system.
