e3500 shutdown not shutting down

[stevenriz]

Hi, we have an e3500 that we made a few kernel changes to and need to restart. I issue the command as follows and basically nothing happens!!

shutdown -y -i6 -g0

It beeps and says shutdown has started, changes to init6 and comes back like nothing ever happened. Never restarts. Anything you can think of that I can check?

Weird.

 

[KenCunningham]

Steven, see my earlier thread about a similar problem with my E450. I still haven't got a definitive answer to that problem, but reboot might work and will restart your kernel. If you get an answer from another source I'd be happy to hear it. Cheers.

 

[stevenriz]

That worked! Thanks! Funny how my other 6 e250s don't restart that way. I use the shutdown command. Also, it didn't seem to do a clean shutdown. It just blanked out and restarted.

Now trying to figure out how to add the "boot disk" for the computer to startup automatically. Any ideas? It usually stops at the {ok} prompt waiting for boot disk.

Anyway, thanks!
Steve

 

[tuka]

set your auto-boot? true

Example:
at the ok prompt:
ok> setenv auto-boot? true

If booted up:
# eeprom auto-boot?=true (this will work on the next shutdown and reboot.

 

[stevenriz]

Tuka, thank you I will run the command now. Thoughts on why I cannot shutdown using the shutdown command? Reboot seems to just dump the system. Is it a clean shutdown?

 

[KenCunningham]

Steven, according to the man pages, reboot at least syncs the disks before initiating a reboot, unless you tell it not to (not recommended as filesystem damage could result). I would suggest that if you have an option, close down applications cleanly first as I agree it does seem to be a little 'harsh' (though I don't know whether it actually is). HTH.

 

[tuka]

I will look into the shutdown problem. If you do an init 0
this will bring the system down as the shutdown command will.
The difference is the init 0 will not notify.

 

[KenCunningham]

Steven - that's a point with by your and my problem - I haven't tested a shutdown -i0 -g0 -y as yet either. At least that should confirm whether it's the shutdown command that's not working or the -i6 option. Unfortunately, there's no way I can shut my server down in the near future to check!!

 

[stevenriz]

This is how it all started. Since I haven't had to shut this server down since it was new over a year ago, I haven't had the pleasure of finding out my problem earlier. We made some kernel changes and when I issued the shutdown -y -g0 -i6 command, it told me to get lost. "y" is not a valid parameter. I typed shutdown without parameters and it returned an entirely different set of parameters that I have never seen before! like f and a few others. Couldn't find man page on it as the man page I looked up was the shutdown command I AM familiar with. I did look in the /usr/sbin and manually ran ./shutdown from there and THAT one was the correct one. Strange. Is there another shutdown command out there somewhere??

 

[KenCunningham]

There is, there's /usr/ucb/shutdown and /etc/shutdown, but I don't know what they do (unless they're of the shutdown -Fr ilk, like AIX). Have you tried finding the version of shutdown your machine thinks is correct with:

which shutdown

Curiouser and curiouser!

 

[tuka]

/etc/shutdown is what you should use
/usr/ucb/shutdown is the backward compatibilty command (Sunos)

 

[KenCunningham]

/etc/shutdown is actually a link back to /usr/sbin/shutdown, so I guess it doesn't matter which your machine thinks it's using.