CentOS Server won't reboot when issuing reboot command

Question

CentOS 5.x

Hi all,

For some reason, my CentOS server didn't want to reboot after I issued the reboot and shutdown -r now commands. All I saw in the /var/log/messages logs were:

Aug 25 13:34:32 voltage-out shutdown[1784]: shutting down for system reboot

Aug 25 13:34:33 voltage-out init: Switching to runlevel: 6

What would cause this? A hung process? How can I best troubleshoot this if it comes up in the future?

-M

Answer 1

You should perform a ps aux to see if any of the shutdown scripts are hung waiting for a process to finish. It should look something like this:

/etc/rc6.d/K##procname

You can try manually issuing a kill command for that hung script. Strange though, since there's a timeout set on the scripts where it will force a -KILL signal to any leftover process.

Also, what's the uptime of the server/box? I've experienced an issue in the past where a box that has an uptime of over a year refuses to shut down. In that case, I've killed each process manually, run sync several times to flush all data to disk and forced a reboot (power cycle).