HI everyone, 

I have a large database on a dedicated server running on CentOS and I need to run some maintenance tasks on it on a weekly basis.  I've tried to write a cron job to do most of this, which works just fine but one thing seems to constantly get in the way...

End users (and end user reporting applications, scripts, etc.) that connect to this database are often connected when I attempt to run these maintenance tasks, so I can never get the database to go to "offline" mode because of these connections.  I thought about scripting a server reboot, but that just scares me in terms of database integrity, etc.   

I thought that maybe I could use IPTABLES to block port 3050 at the time that I run these scripts, but when I tried that on the server, the database became non-responsive to me.  This is a FB Classic server, using xinetd to deal with the inbound connections.

This is also for FB 2.5 and I also need to use this on FB 1.5 (both Classic).  

If anyone has done this sort of thing successfully, I'd love to know the method you found that works for this.

Thanks

Myles