Can't stop/start SDE

[MilesJordan]

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 xxxx -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 solution]

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.

[VinceAngelo]

The running 'sdemon' process "remembers" the password used to start it, so if you
change the SDE user password while it's running, you can't use the new password
to stop it.

There's little risk of corrupting the metadata tables in the SDE user if you've done
something to corrupt the application server install (if it can't connect, it can't hose
the tables).

'sdemon -o info' communicates directly with the giomgr daemon process (without
a password), so it would not be affected by a password change.

- V