Hey Niall, > those of you out there running multiple oracle homes, potentially with > multiple oracle software owners and certainly with multiple listeners on > Linux. How do you control db and listener startup at boot time? dbstart > seems entirely inadequate. I turn it off completely. I ran into a hardware issue once upon a time that caused the server to crash -- very likely without syncing -- then bounce constantly over night. While the DB was spared, I was concerned that there could have been damage to the physical files should the crash happen during startup or operation. So I turned off autostart completely. It's good review for me to make sure I can restart Oracle, even the somewhat more complex all-on-one-box Grid Control. It helps validate my documentation. And the few times per decade that I need to reboot, it's not really that much trouble. Being a paranoid control-freak DBA, I much much much prefer a manual startup. My $0.02 (backed by .00001176 oz of gold), Rich -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l