I have installed Oracle 9.2.0.1 on RH9. I am trying to get it to autostart when the machine boots. I have an autostart script, and I modified rc.local to call the script.

When the machine boots up, the database starts ok. So the script seems to work. However, i get the following message when the machine boots up and is running my script:

mesg: error: tty device is not owned by group 'tty'

Can anyone tell me what is causing this error from my script?

Here is my script, it is located in /home/oracle/scripts/

#
# Oracle autostart script
#
start()
{
echo -n "Starting Oracle Database: "
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
date +" %T %a %D :Starting Oracle as part of system startup. " >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
su - oracle -c dbstart >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "Done."
echo -n "Starting Oracle Listner: "
su - oracle -c "lsnrctl start" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "Done."
echo
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
date +" %T %a %D :Finished. " >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
exit
touch /var/lock/subsys/oracled
}
stop()
{
echo -n "Stoping Oracle Listener: "
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
date +" %T %a %D :Stoping Oracle as part of system shutdown. " >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
su - oracle -c "lsnrctl stop" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "Done."
echo -n "Stoping Oracle Database: "
su - oracle -c dbshut >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "Done."
echo
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
date +" %T %a %D :Finished. " >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
echo "-------------------------------------------------------" >> /home/oracle/log/oracled
exit
rm -rf /var/lock/subsys/oracled
}

case "$1" in
start)
start
;;
stop)
;;
restart)
stop
sleep 3
start
;;
*)
echo "Usage: oracled {start|stop|restart}"
exit 1
esac


Here is the line in rc.local that calls the script:

# Added to start oracle on boot
. /home/oracle/scripts/oracled

"Can anyone tell me what is causing this error from my script?"

Check your tty devices. Log in as root and issue this command:
ls -l /dev/tty* | less

Some of the tty devices should have a group name of tty. In particular the tty device assigned to whatever username is running Oracle (oracle?) should probably have a group name of tty.




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Steve Stites

ok. i'm still a bit of a newbie here....

i do have a user named oracle that owns and runs all the Oracle database stuff.

from /dev , how do i know which tty device is assigned to oracle?

"from /dev , how do i know which tty device is assigned to oracle?"

You are looking for a device with a name in the form of /dev/ttyx, where x is a number, and /dev/ttyx has an owner of oracle and a group name of tty. Take a look at your /dev/ttyx devices with the following command:

ls -l /dev/tty* | less

If oracle owns a tty which has an incorrect group name then change the group name to tty with a command patterned after:

chown oracle:tty /dev/tty7

If there is no /dev/ttyn owned by oracle you may have to delete the user oracle and recreate it. Practice first on a name like delphi to make sure this will solve the problem before you delete oracle.

Also is the problem nothing more than a nuisance? Does Oracle go ahead and work OK anyway?

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yeah, the error message is just a nuisance when the machine boots; which i know will rarely ever happen since it is up 24x7. i was curious if there was an easy fix. the oracle database starts up and works just fine.

i don't have any /dev/ttyx owned by oracle. they are all owned by root and have a group of either tty or uucp. i did try to add the oracle user to the tty group, but that didn't work.

i tried creating a new user, delphi, to see if a tty device showed up in /dev as being owned by delphi. it did not. my guess is that when i create a new user, i'm using the RH User Manager, which is run as root; so when it creates new users, the tty devices are owned by root. is that guess correct?

is there something in my script i could change that would avoid the error mesg? do you think this is even worth trying to fix?

" i'm using the RH User Manager, which is run as root; so when it creates new users, the tty devices are owned by root. is that guess correct?"

You are correct in that the RH User Manager is the program that should be setting the ownership of a tty to each new user. The fact that you are running RH User Manager as root is irrelevant to the problem.

"they are all owned by root and have a group of either tty or uucp. "

Probably Red Hat handles tty ownership differently than SuSE or Oracle expects. Maybe the user oracle is being assigned to a tty with a user name of uucp and Oracle is reporting that as an error, which it would be an error on SuSE.

"do you think this is even worth trying to fix?"

Only for the sake of neatness. The best way to fix this problem is to report it to Oracle as a minor bug in Oracle.

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Steve Stites