KILL! KILL! KILL! (of Unix processes)

08/01/2018 4 Comments

The start of this isn’t my post – I got it from here: but I wanted to reblog/repost and enhance it because as far as I can tell, 99% of all known DBA’s only use kill -9 to remove unhappy processes.

Original Post:

Useless Use of Kill -9 form letter

No no no.  Don't use kill -9.

It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:

1) shut down socket connections

2) clean up temp files

3) inform its children that it is going away

4) reset its terminal characteristics

and so on and so on and so on.

Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't
work, send 2, and if that doesn't work, send 1.  If that doesn't,
REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is badly behaved!**

Don't use kill -9.  Don't bring out the combine harvester just to tidy
up the flower pot.

**don’t remove your Oracle or any other binaries please.

 

I hope you found that useful. I know I did. But what do the numbers mean? Well, they are increasingly violent ways to ask the program to stop itself. The command kill -9 isn’t asking the program to stop, it’s asking the O/S to stop running the program now, regardless of what it’s doing.

Run order of kills:

kill -15 : this is the equivalent of kill -sigterm and it the default. The program should terminate after it has finished what it is doing.

kill -2 : this is the equivalent of kill -sigint and is the same as pressing CTRL+C. This should mean “stop what you’re doing” — and it may or may not kill the program.

kill -1 : this is the equivalent of kill -sighup and tells the program that the user has disconnected. (e.g. SSH session or terminal window was closed). It usually results in a graceful shutdown of the program.

The executing program needs to be coded to recognise these kill signals, and all good software will spot them.

The other fun kill command is kill -sigstop. This can’t be blocked (like -9) as it’s an O/S level command too, but freezes the program execution like pressing CTRL+Z. You can continue the program execution later using kill -sigcont.

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Filed under Administration, Unix Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Auditing Read-Only Standbys

25/03/2015 Leave a comment

If your company has a passing interest in database security, you are probably running some sort of session auditing at the very least [audit session] (although this can also be useful for troubleshooting connectivity issues). There’s a reasonable chance you’re also running some level of object auditing, or even DML access auditing if your employer so dictates:

Check access/change of objects in the DB
  1  select audit_option, success, failure
  2  from dba_stmt_audit_opts
  3  union
  4  select privilege, success, failure
  5  from dba_priv_audit_opts
  6* order by 2,1
AUDIT_OPTION                                       SUCCESS                                  FAILURE
-------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- -----------------
ALTER ANY PROCEDURE                                BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
ALTER ANY TABLE                                    BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
ALTER DATABASE                                     BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
ALTER PROFILE                                      BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
ALTER SYSTEM                                       BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
ALTER TABLE                                        BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
ALTER USER                                         BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
AUDIT SYSTEM                                       BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE ANY JOB                                     BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE ANY LIBRARY                                 BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE ANY PROCEDURE                               BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE ANY TABLE                                   BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE EXTERNAL JOB                                BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE LIBRARY                                     BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE PROCEDURE                                   BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE PUBLIC DATABASE LINK                        BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE SESSION                                     BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE TABLE                                       BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE USER                                        BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
DATABASE LINK                                      BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
DIRECTORY                                          BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
DROP ANY PROCEDURE                                 BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
DROP ANY TABLE                                     BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
DROP PROFILE                                       BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
DROP USER                                          BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
EXEMPT ACCESS POLICY                               BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
GRANT ANY OBJECT PRIVILEGE                         BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
GRANT ANY PRIVILEGE                                BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
GRANT ANY ROLE                                     BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
PROFILE                                            BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
PUBLIC DATABASE LINK                               BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
PUBLIC SYNONYM                                     BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
ROLE                                               BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
SYSTEM AUDIT                                       BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
SYSTEM GRANT                                       BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
USER                                               BY ACCESS                                BY ACCESS
CREATE JOB                                         BY SESSION                               BY SESSION

And you’re probably writing it into a database table [AUDIT_TRAIL=’DB’]

so how does that work if you open a Dataguard database read only? You are writing into sys.aud$ on the Primary, and that table is replicated to the Standby. So what happens?

From Oracle 11G, if you are running Dataguard and opening the standby up for read access, you may not notice the line in the ALERT log which reads:

AUDIT_TRAIL initialization parameter is changed to OS, as DB is NOT compatible for database opened with read-only access

So it starts writing down O/S audit trail files for all of your auditing options (well, the session connect and DML audit options – you can’t run DDL in a r/o DB). You might want to go and see just how many files it has written to [audit_file_dest], as you may be surprised at just how many are in there.

You may, one day, either run out of space or (more worryingly) have so many millions of files that it causes a performance problem when Oracle access the O/S directory. You might want to think about some sort of periodic clean-up job.

Filed under Administration, audit, oracle, Performance and Tuning, Problem Solving, Unix Tagged with , , ,

Dennis Ritchie RIP

16/10/2011 Leave a comment

There can be few scientists who have contributed so much to the world as Dennis Ritchie. Completely anonymous to the world at large, and to far too much of the computing fraternity too, his involvement in the development of C – the first portable programming language, and Unix cannot be understated. Who uses Unix? Well, everybody. What is the O/S on embedded devices? What did Steve Jobs base his Mac O/S and Mobile Operating systems on? Upon what did Bill Gates base the operating system for the new IBM PC in 1980? What do corporations across the world use to power their servers? What is it all built on? Unless you’re running some proprietary mainframe software, the building blocks of what you are using were set, to some degree, by Dennis Ritchie.

Whilst I never met him myself I did work with his sister, Lynn, for several years at a software house in the North East of England, where she still resides. She told me some of the stories about him; how the invention of C and Unix were really aims in making computing more portable, more standard, easier to use. How all that Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and the others got for this was their salary [although they did make a few quid on top out of their books 🙂 ], and the ability to distribute Unix free, with C, to all and sundry as Bell labs, a subsidiary of AT&T, had no financial interest in computing as they were a regulated telephone monopoly at the time.

Thanks Dennis.

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