Can't stop/start SDE

Question

Hello, I am having difficulty with the SDE service that I'm currently running. It won't stop, and tells me that it's because the DBA Password is wrong. It's not. I even changed it again on the database to make sure, and I can connect with other clients.

Solaris 11/11
SDE 10.0
Oracle 11.2.0.3$ sdemon -p xyz -o shutdown -N  Invalid DBA password, Unable to shutdown instance esri_sde on myserver

The problem right now is that the SDE is running and I can't stop it, and most likely would not be able to start it if I killed the process (it's a production environment). I haven't changed any of the environment variables for SDE in ages and have started/stopped it many times before. The only thing that I can think of is that I reconfigured the Oracle listener since it was started, but I did the same on my test server and it works just fine.

I'm thinking that I might need to reconfigure SDE, but I'm not really sure how to do it and don't want to lose all of the registered tables in the database. I can back them up and restore them though if reconfiguring SDE destroys that data.

Strangely enough, I can connect just fine using the same credentials using sqlplus in the shell environment that SDE runs in, and commands such as "sdemon -o info -I users" work properly.

Does anyone have any hints for me?

MilesJordan · Accepted Answer

Just a followup to say that I got it working. In the end I waited for all ArcGIS users to go home and killed the process, and was able to start it again without problems. I also tested stopping it properly which worked.