Time Games

[Sylvia Welch]

We need to determine that an application will work after Nov 30 of this year. It runs against an Oracle 7.3.4 application. The database will be a test instance that we're ready to deactivate. What procedure should we use to accomplish this? We're running 11.0, serviceguard in a 3 node cluster. My thoughts:

Remove this test node as a failover in the cluster.

Shutdown all applications on test node.

Turn of NTPD (we're pulling time from a Windows domain controller).

Change the date using the date command.

Fire up the application and run the test.

Shutdown application, then the system to Single user.

Set to correct time, turn NTPD backup on.

We don't care about the test database and will end up wiping out the volume group that it lives. This machine is a cell server for Data Protector, but I have that in a package and will have it down before we start.

Am I missing anything here?

Thanks
Syl

[DCE]

Syl

Since you are going into test mode, you may want to shutdown any monitoring of the system (openview?) and you may also want to look at the cron jobs for potential issues

Dave

[Charles McCary · Accepted solution]

Sounds overly complicated.

Why not just stop the package, halt the node and then bring up the vg's, filesystems, db, and app manually?

That way you don't have to change your cluster config.

The rest sounds ok. Also, I think if you change the time too far from what ntp thinks it is supposed to be it will not reset automatically anyway.

Have fun.
c

[Sylvia Welch]

I might go one better, since the instance is in a package, bring up the whole package with the new date.

Syl

[Bill Hassell]

And if you've setup NTP in the 'normal way', re-starting your server into multi-user mode will automtically reset the time using ntpdate in the xntpd startup script. No need to change the date in single user mode, just reboot the server.