8i bug in dbstart

I ran into this bug while setting up 8i enterprise edition on solaris 7
(sparc). I'm not sure if it affects other distributions or not. I
noticed that after I installed 8i and set up automatic startup/shutdown
(using init.d script pointing to dbstart and dbshut) oracle wouldn't be
running after I restarted the machine. I tried running the dbstart command manually and got the message:

    Database "dbname" warm started.
but there were no oracle processes running. It turns out that one line in the 'dbstart' script located in $ORACLE_HOME/bin is outdated and doesn't work. To fix this problem, change line 64 from:

    /PL\/SQL (Release|Version)/ {substr($3,1,3) ; to something like:

    /Oracle8i/ {substr($5,1,3) ;

and line 64 from:

    print substr($3,1,3)}'`
to

    print substr($5,1,3)}'`

What's happening here, is that the script is trying to determine the version of oracle installed on the system. It's using the command 'svrmgrl command=exit' to obtain the version number. Apparently in past versions, the line with the oracle version number contained the string 'PL/SQL' followed by either the word Release or Version. As of 8i Release 2 for solaris (8.1.6) the output of the 'svrmgrl command=exit' command contains the following string instead:

    Oracle8i Enterprise Edition Release 8.1.6.0.0 - Production As you can see, the 'PL/SQL' string is nowhere to be found, and thus the version gets set wrong, causing the rest of the script to screw up. In the fix above, we grab the line with 'Oracle8i' and grab the first three characters of the version element ($5 instead of $3).

I don't know if oracle knows about this or not, so if anyone knows where this should be reported - please let me know.

MikeH Received on Sun Jan 23 2000 - 16:34:00 CST