9iAS R2 Automatic Startup at Boot time on Windows

Question

How to successfully start the 9iAS R2 Application Server at boot time.
Many of you are still struggling with the problem of 9iAS R2 not automatically starting up properly when your system is restarted. I've been fighting this issue for several weeks and have found the problems, and pitfalls, involved with fixing it. It really is a race condition of things trying to start up before something it depends on is fully functioning, or some application starting out of sequence.
There is a bug associated with this problem; BUG 2511270 ( 9IASV2 Need Ability to Restart All Components in Instance After a Reboot). The bug report itself has very little useful information in it other than to say it doesn't work, and manually starting the components is the only known fix. If you're like me. this isn't a good enough answer.
Your mileage may vary.
My configuration has a 9.2.0.1 customer database, and a 9.0.1.3.1 infrastructure database that is also the application server database, including portals, all installed on the same system which is a Pentium 4, Windows 2000 machine, with 1.5GB of memory. I only use a single LISTENER, which runs out of the 9.2 DB ORACLE_HOME.
Chapter 5 (Starting and Stopping the Application Server) of the Oracle9i Application Server Administrator's Guide shows all of the commands necessary, in the proper order, to manually start the infrastructure and application server. Unfortunately, there is also some incorrect information in this document.
Part 1c in the section Starting an Infrastructure Using Commands on Windows, using SQLPlus to connect to and start the database, does not work unless oracle.exe is already running (which means that you recently shutdown the database by command, not with "services>stop"). If your system is rebooting, oracle.exe is not running. This exact same information is documented in the Database Administrators Guide, Chapter 4, Starting a Database. If you don't have these manuals handy the offending commands are as follows:
ORACLE_HOME\bin\sqlplus /nologsql> connect sys/password_for_sys as sysdba
sql> startup
sql> quit
Since we can't put some variant of the above in a command script to manually start the databases and wait for it to open, the only option left is to let the databases come up in "automatic" mode when the system boots, and run the remaining commands when they are open. If your system is like mine, that can take several minutes, even after you've logged on and gotten your first cup of coffee.
If you set up a command script to run at startup, you don't have any control over when the script gets run, more than likely, in this case, before the databases are open. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not have anything resembling a sleep (timer, wait, delay, etc) command that can be used in a script. There may be something somewhere, but I can't find it. So I wrote one in Perl, which does have a sleep command. You can use anything you have available to you that will function as needed. We obtained our Perl distribution from http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Perl.
The next issue has to do with starting the Oracle Internet Directory. The documentation shows two commands to execute, but in reality, only the first one is required, it automatically takes care of the second one. Refer to the command file below for the correct one.
The last issue deals with running the dcmctl commands. If you run these commands one at a time in a command window, you won't notice anything askew. If you run them, as shown, in a script, they will stop execution of the script when they complete, and there will be no indication that anything wrong has happened. The CMD.exe still exists, it just isn't running. They must be run in there own cmd command as shown below.
Now, let's review the steps necessary to get all this to work.
Put the two scripts shown below in there target directories and edit any necessary changes for your system.
In Start>Settings>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services set the OracleServiceSID's and the OracleOraHomeTNSListener to Automatic Startup Type. All other Oracle* services should be set to Manual.
In Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Scheduled Tasks double click on the Add Scheduled Task item,
select Next,
Browse to where your startup script resides,
double click the file name,
select "When my computer starts",
select Next,
Enter a user name and password (that has ORA_DBA privileges)
select Next, then Finish.
Uncomment the first exit in the iasStartup.cmd script.
Reboot your system.
Compare the database open time stamp in each database alert log to the time recorded in the iasStartup.log file to determine you first time delay. Add 10-20 seconds or more to this difference just to be safe. If you add services at a later time, this number may need to be increased.
Edit the iasStartup.cmd file to include this time delay for the first sleep command and comment out the first exit command.
Reboot your system.
After several minutes, all infrastructure and application server processes should be up and running. You can check this in several ways; Look at the log file to see if all commands were run, Look at the Windows Task Manager to see if all expected tasks are running, Look at Services to see what is running. Finally, you can look at the Infrastructure Enterprise Manager Website and click on each instance to determine the current status of each system component. On mine, the component Portal:portal:7779 always shows as down but in reality it is functioning.
The following command script only starts the minimum set of processes that I require. Your requirements may be different so refer to the documentation for additional commands.
Enjoy.
******** iasStartup.cmd ********
REM # iasStartup.cmd
REM # Command script to start the infrastructure and application server at system boot
REM # Mike Bukaty
REM # Sandia National Laboratories
REM # [email protected]
REM # set default directory that contains the log and sleep.pl files.
cd E:\Oracle\admin
echo Starting iasStartup.cmd > iasStartup.log
time /t >> iasStartup.log
REM # Uncomment the following command to determine the time delay for your system
REM # exit
REM # This delay is determined by looking at the times from the alert logs
REM # for when the database was opened and the time recorded above.
REM # SLEEP is a perl script to do just that (in seconds) since Windows doesn't have one.
sleep.pl -delay=120
time /t >> iasStartup.log
REM #Start the infrastructure first
REM #The SID for the infrastructure must be set
set ORACLE_HOME=E:\Oracle\as9inf
set ORACLE_SID=iasdb
echo Starting as9inf oidmon >> iasStartup.log
%ORACLE_HOME%\bin\oidmon start
echo Starting as9inf EMWebsite >> iasStartup.log
net start Oracleas9infEMWebsite
REM # Have to wait for all of the website process to finish
sleep.pl -delay=40
REM # All calls to dcmctl must be in there own CMD environment,
REM # or they will halt this one when they complete
echo Starting as9inf dcmctl ohs >> iasStartup.log
cmd /c %ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\dcmctl start -ct ohs
sleep.pl -delay=5
echo Starting as9inf dcmctl OC4J_DAS >> iasStartup.log
cmd /c %ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\dcmctl start -co OC4J_DAS
REM # Start the application server
set ORACLE_HOME=E:\Oracle\ora9ias
echo Starting ora9ias webcachectl >> iasStartup.log
%ORACLE_HOME%\bin\webcachectl start >> iasStartup.log
echo Starting ora9ias dcmctl ohs >> iasStartup.log
cmd /c %ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\dcmctl start -ct ohs
sleep.pl -delay=10
echo Starting ora9ias dcmctl OC4J >> iasStartup.log
cmd /c %ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\dcmctl start -ct OC4J
REM # The above command starts all existing OC4J processes.
REM # You can now stop any that aren't necessary.
echo Stopping ora9ias dcmctl OC4J_Demos >> iasStartup.log
cmd /c %ORACLE_HOME%\dcm\bin\dcmctl stop -co OC4J_Demos
time /t >> iasStartup.log
echo Finished iasStartup.cmd >> iasStartup.log
exit
******** sleep.pl ********
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
## Author: Mike Bukaty
##               Sandia National Laboratories
##               [email protected]
## Program: sleep.pl
$| = 1;
use strict;
use Getopt::Long;
Getopt::Long::Configure("no_ignore_case");
GetOptions(
"delay=s" => \ my $delay,
# Set default options
if( not defined($delay) ) { $delay = 1; }
sleep $delay;
exit 1;

Answer 1

New information:
When I originally wrote this, the command script worked as advertised. That was yesterday. I've since had to add the following lines just BEFORE the call to start the oidmon.
echo Starting as9inf oidctl >> iasStartup.log
%ORACLE_HOME%\bin\oidctl server=oidldapd configset=0 instance=1 start
Sometimes me thinks that Oracle reconfigures itself at night when I'm not watching.
Enjoy.