sqlplus hangs....

Came across this bug today where sqlplus hangs while everything else on this old Linux 3 vm (an app server) appears to be running. Could this be due to some missing libraries.... or a memory leak...load appears normal.

strace shows infinite 'times(null)' system calls and it turns out to be a bug in the Oracle client oci in 10.2.0.1 and apparently this bug# 4612267 presents itself if the server uptime is more than 248 days and in this case, the uptime is exactly 249 days.

This is a legacy system so it's untouched for a long time, a good reminder to upgrade and patch systems regularly.

Finally, a simple restart of the app server fixed the issue and gave us another 248 days to think about the patch ;-)