Lost power last night, now question about shutdown

English Install/Boot/Login
1

My UPS unit woke me up at 4 am and I shut down everything (I haven’t configured SuSE 11 to work with the UPS yet). I had two Dell towers, different models, right next to each other, one logged into KDE 4.1, the other at the login screen. The one that I was logged into shutdown fine.

The other, which is my file server and has terabytes of hard drives in it, got to the end of the shutdown screens and stopped there. Green screen, openSUSE, and the pale-green/transparent-white progress bar had gone all the way across, the machine just wouldn’t shut down. It’s 4 am, my UPS is beeping at me, the machine won’t turn off, and I couldn’t see what was going on. My guesses in my half-awake 4 am brain were that it was a normal shutdown waiting for a wake-on-lan or something, or there was a lot of journaling that needed to be done. SSH was off, no telnet access, couldn’t escape to the console. I tried blindly logging in as root and ordered shutdown -t now, didn’t work. The power came back on and I went to sleep. This morning, the machine still hadn’t shut down. So I hit the power button, rebooted, everything was fine, and I don’t understand what happened, why the machine didn’t power down.

The last lines in /var/log/messages are


Aug 13 04:18:10 swizzle auditd[2213]: The audit daemon is exiting.
Aug 13 04:18:11 swizzle kernel: Kernel logging (proc) stopped.
Aug 13 04:18:11 swizzle kernel: Kernel log daemon terminating.
Aug 13 04:18:11 swizzle syslog-ng[1600]: syslog-ng version 1.6.12 going down

It is a 10 year old, 900 MHz Dell with a GeForce 6200. Thoughts?

2

Has it shutdown completely before? Is your box a REAL server (aka manufacturer classifies it as a server)? At a previous internship I had, they used sun servers and they would ‘shutdown’ but not power off. They would shutdown to a hardware management interface that was proprietary to sun, but they were still ‘powered’ on. Maybe Dell has this?

3

Some systems also have shutdown issues caused by a buggy ACPI… they shut down, but don’t power off… This would be the case if it’s never shut down properly before.
Next time, try Raising some Skinny Elephants using the SysRQ key if it hangs:
Hold ALT+SysRQ key and type the following: RSEISUO with about 1 second between each letter. This does an emergency shutdown that is safer than just flipping the switch.
(Memory trick: (R)aising (S)kinny (E)lephants (I)s (S)o (U)tterly (O)utdated) (Replace O with a B to reboot, B= (B)oring )