I recently recommended the utilization of Oracle Services to a new client. I knew that you have to start a service manually if you restart your cluster. I told them that I will investigate on how to set the services to autostart. I knew that there is an AUTO_START property of the clusterware service resource set to “restore”, which means that at instance crash, Clusterware will restore the services to the status before crash. However, on manual shutdown/startup, the services will not be autostarted.

[root@ora-vm1 tmp]# crs_stat -p ora.MDDB.S_TEST.MDDB1.srv
NAME=ora.MDDB.S_TEST.MDDB1.srv
TYPE=application
AUTO_START=restore
…

I did some research and learned that the easiest way to configure autostart is with user callouts. A quick web search referred me to the OTN site “Real Application Clusters Sample Scripts” which contains a FAN callout script to autostart services.

The steps to install the scripts are:

1. Copy them to $ORA_CRS_HOME/racg/usrco on both nodes
2. Set permissions to 710 and ownership to oracle:oinstall or whatever your installation is using.
3. Modify perl Scripts to contain your ORA_CRS_HOME, ORACLE_HOME. Moreover, if you have used short hostnames for your CRS installation, you have to change “/bin/hostname” to “/bin/hostname -s”.

I just realized that Dan Norris also blogged about this topic.