15

After entering

shutdown now

in terminal I get everything running normally and then:

All processes ended withing 2 seconds...done
INIT: Going single user
INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal
INIT: Sending processes the KILL signal
Give root password for maintenance(or....

I press Ctrl + D, and it shows me login screen Debian. Shutdown through GUI works properly.

UPDATE 1

It seems some process hangs.

Moreover, I've managed to power off the server through several retries. Recently I've installed only ntp and ntpdate, nothing more.

I suppose it might be it conflicting with iptables.

4 Answers 4

30

You need to use the -h switch to halt the system. Default for shutdown is to switch to run level 1 (maintenance).

shutdown -h now

See man shutdown.

7
  • 1
    Neither new nor debian specific, it's the same on SuSE (and goes back at least 15 years there). RHEL and descendants do this differently, I believe.
    – Sven
    Mar 23, 2012 at 10:10
  • 6
    Not at all -- it's been the default for the last 10 years to my knowledge. It's not Linux specific -- the Solaris shutdown manpage says "By default, shutdown brings the system to a state where only the console has access to the operating system. This state is called single-user."
    – womble
    Mar 23, 2012 at 10:12
  • 3
    Haven't tested it on Debian, but on ubuntu to power off the system you could also use the command poweroff without any arguments.
    – fdierre
    Mar 23, 2012 at 12:49
  • 1
    @womble you can easily multiply that 10 by 3, it already has this in 80's BSDs.
    – Legolas
    Mar 23, 2012 at 14:29
  • 1
    @Legolas: Technically I can't, because it's 10 years "to my knowledge". Just showing my n00bness, I guess. <grin>
    – womble
    Mar 24, 2012 at 1:54
6

Use the -h option to shutdown to request a halt or a power off instead of just requesting to init that you are going to single user mode (which seems to be the default behaviour)

shutdown -h now
6

shutdown now drops your Debian to maintenance mode. Use shutdown -h now instead.

4

You can save some typing by using 'halt' instead of 'shutdown -h now'

3
  • 4
    No, not really. Some versions of init have this behavior, but others issue a halt instruction in this case, which frequently results in a system hang or reboot. I just tested this on some vm's I have handy, and on upstart and SysVinit, halt is a synonym for poweroff, but on systemd, it hangs after stopping init. Mar 23, 2012 at 17:57
  • Which init does Debian use by default? The rest are pretty irrelevant to a SE answer I believe, and I've never had halt fail on any debian machine I've tried it on.
    – gparent
    Mar 23, 2012 at 20:54
  • 1
    With regards to TokenMacGuy’s comment that halt hangs the system, this is true on FreeBSD at least. On FreeBSD, you need halt -p to actually power the system off after halting. Mar 24, 2012 at 5:56

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