There is a lot in here.
While shutting down a DB to make a 'cold' backup is certainly an option, it is not a particulary friedly one. There are better (oracle) tools. Check out Rman!
You may also want to shutdown the oracle more harshly: 'shutdown immediate'
Certainly there is little point asking your (client) box about oracle processes as originally thought. You need to know about the server, and there Oracle is mutlythreaded, so just one process does it all and thus a simple process scan can not check for activity.
However, oracel has all the tools to just ask it who is talking to it.
Check out tables v$session and v$process.
For a sample query, to be executed from any (client) system that can talk to the server below.
Groetjes,
Hein van den Heuvel
column id format 999;
column Local format 99999999;
column Remote format 99999999;
column Node format a9;
column Local_Program format a20;
column Remote_Program format a24;
set pages 9999;
set lines 132;
select pid "Id", spid "Local", process "Remote",
s.machine "Node", SUBSTR(p.program,1,20) "Local Program",
SUBSTR(s.program,1,24) "Remote Program"
from v$process p, v$session s
where addr = paddr
order by machine, spid
/
