Hi there,

I was wondering if any of you good people out there could answer these question:

A - why Unix servers are bounced once a in while in commercial environments?

B - in what circumestances Unix Server are bouced?

Many thanks for your time.

Kind regards
MH

Where I work now we have a scheduled monthly maintenance window. On a particular Saturday we get to do whatever we need to the boxes. Everybody that uses the systems knows this and nobody works that Saturday.

Our policy is any system which hasn't been rebooted for 90 days is rebooted. Oracle servers and some Veritas Cluster Server clusters are rebooted each month instead. There are a few production boxes exempted from the policy because they support manufacturing plants which have shifts working on Saturdays.

As for the reason why - it is basically just for cleanup purposes. Stale NFS handles, zombie processes, small memory leaks from applications, etc. are all cleaned up by the reboot. Also it is a way of testing to make sure everything runs smoothly with the startup and shutdown scripts so we don't find problems with them when there is an unscheduled reboot.

I've worked other places that never rebooted machines unless it was for a specific purpose - hardware upgrades/repairs, software installs which require it, etc. It all depends on the environment and what the system admins prefer whether a scheduled reboot is appropriate or not.

Hi rhfrommn,

Many many thanks for you response.

Best regards

MH

Hi rhfrommn,

Hope all is well with you.

In your response to my question "Bouncing Servers", you mentioned you also bounced the Oracle servers and some Veritas Cluster Server.
Just to ask you what is the command for shutting down and starting up an Oracle Server, lets say Oracle 8i and would you use the same command for Oracle 11i and above.

Once again many thanks for your time.

Kind regards

MH

Have a look at an Oracle SQLPLUS manual for the shutdown command.
There are different guises of Oracle shutdowns depending on additional parameters.
But I am no Oracle Admin.
In cluster start/stop scripts that I wrote I used the
"shutdown immediate" command when logged on as SYSDBA to the instance.
But this was after getting confirmation from Oracle DBAs.
They should better know what their servers can cope with.

Hello buffoonix,

Thank you very much for your response.

Soon after posting my thread "Bouncing Oracle Servers" I had a look at Oracle SQL*PLUS Manual (Oracle 9i) on the web and found out my answer for this paticular version.

As you said, there are number of ways to startup and shutdown an Oracle server
1- using SQL*PLUS
2- using RMAN
3- using Oracle Eneterprise Manager.

Once again many thanks for your time.

Best regards

MH

Sorry for the delayed response, I was out of the office a couple days.

The way we do it is that the Oracle DBAs have written scripts placed in /etc/rc2.d on our Sun boxes to start up and shut down their databases. When I reboot the box during maintenance I just issue the command "init 6" to cause a reboot. That command runs all the shutdown scripts before the reboot occurs, so the DBA's script takes care of their databases. That way I don't have to log into Oracle at all. One of the DBA team will be in the office for maintenance as well so if there is a problem (for example one of the servers hangs on the shutdown script or the databases don't restart after the reboot) they can check it out.