How to drop a DB2 instance when the instance owner was removed

Question

This is a real sticky situation. I was handed over a machine (running an AIX 7.1), and my first task was to re-install DB2 server on it. But someone before me had conveniently removed an instance owner account, and probably recreated it. Now, the problem is this:

1) When I try to uninstall DB2, it says the instance is active and has to be dropped first.

2) When I try to drop this instance, DB2 says there is no such instance.

I am quite new to DB2 administration. Not sure how to proceed here. Any help is appreciated

Thanks

Answer 1

If you dropped the instance from the file system (perhaps while DB2 was down with db2stop), then, DB2 still "knows" about the instance because its directories contain a reference to it.

I would perhaps try to uncatalog the instance first (this would remove it from the directories).

Try the following:

db2 uncatalog node <instance name>;
db2 terminate;

And see if that doens't help. You may also need to remove the instance definition from the DB2 registry:

# make sure there is a space after the equals sign to unassign this variable.
db2set DB2INSTDEF= -g
db2stop
db2start

As with anything, try to take a backup of everything before you mess around so you don't make it worse.