Re: Oracle hangs, no errors

"Vladimir M. Zakharychev" <bob_at_dpsp-yes.com> wrote in message news:<9u0hk4$hi0$1_at_babylon.agtel.net>...
> This one sounds like the problem they may be hitting. As far as I remember,
> this bug is connected with control file corruption on normal shutdowns of
> the database which was running non-stop more than 248 days or so. Solaris
> has a ticker counting number of seconds since last restart, this ticker overflows
> and becomes negative and Oracle goes nuts. The workaround was to reboot
> the system once in a while and if it was up more than said amount of time,
> shutdown abort the oracle instance and reboot the system. They also said that
> if controlfile corruption is already in effect, there is no other way to get the
> system back than to reinstall and restore from last known good backup. By the
> way, the bug was not platform-specific, it was confirmed on other unixes too,
> though time to failure was different for some of them (where ticker counted
> hundredths of a second the failure was coming earlier).
>
> Correct me if I am wrong.
>
> --
> Vladimir Zakharychev (bob@dpsp-yes.com) http://www.dpsp-yes.com
> Dynamic PSP(tm) - the first true RAD toolkit for Oracle-based internet applications.
> All opinions are mine and do not necessarily go in line with those of my employer.
>
>

Vladimir,
  I ran into this bug, the so-called 248 day bug, with 8.1.6. There is no corruption caused by this error. Any corruptions were caused by DBA's panicking. If the system has been up more than 248 days and you try to start or stop the instance, it will hang. The way to fix it is to do a shutdown abort, bounce the server and then restart the database.

The problem lies in the way Oracle reads the OS-timer that tracks how long the system has been running.. When it reaches a certain point, it starts with negative numbers and this is what Oracle didn't like.

As far as the original post here goes, the bug didn't cause any problem to a running database. I have an 8.1.6 database, running on Solaris 2.6, that has been up since August of 2000. No problems.

I'm wondering if they are in Archive log mode and are having problems archiving before the redo-log is needed again. This will appear to be a hang. Without more information, it is hard to diagnose.

HTH,
Patrick .. Received on Wed Nov 28 2001 - 10:17:32 CST