CSIM Technical Notes

Another way to shutdown all the systems

When a power interruption is planed, it is easy to set-up a programmed shutdown of the machines, using a scheduled shutdown.

The machines should be stopped in the following order that will conform with the interdependancies between the services:

First, stop the machines that no other service depends on:

The machines are ufo, mail, firewall, router, bazooka, active, amanda, database, door, guppy, gourami, puffer and exam.

Second, stop the file server:

The machine is banyan.

Third, stop DNS and authentication:

The machines are dns and ldap.

Fourth, stop the syslog server:

The machine is sysl.

Fifth, stop the virtual servers:

The machines are virtual, virtual2, virtual3, virtual4, virtual5, teal1 and teal2.

There should be approximately 10 minutes between each steps, so if the first phase should stop on Sunday at 7:00, the second phase will be on Sunday at 7:10, etc. and the last phase on Sunday at 7:40.

Add a crontab entry line in root user on each machine, this will allow to schedule the shutdown a long time in advance.

The date and time for crontab are as follow:
minute hour day-of-the-month month day-of-the-week
where the minutes are between 0—59, the hour 0—23 and Sunday is represented by either 0 or 7.

On FreeBSD the command is:

0 7 * * 0 /sbin/shutdown -p now

On Linux the command is:

0 7 * * 0 /sbin/shutdown -h now

On ESXi the procedure is:

Note: The time on ESXi servers is UTC, so the clock is 7 hours back: to stop the machine a 7:40, you must enter a time of 0:40. If you plan to stop the server around midnight, you must enter the time as 17:00.

1. Go to /var/spool/cron/crontab
2. Change the file root to writable chmod 600 root
3. Edit the file root and add the line 40 0 * * 0 /bin/poweroff
4. Find the crond process ps -c|grep crond
5. And kill it
6. Restart the crond process /usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox crond

After the system has bee restarted, you must remove or comment out the line in the crontab (except on ESXi servers and firewall); else the system will shutdown on the next Sunday.

Amanda starts a backup run every night at 00:05, it is better to halt the machine around 23:50, before a run, than just when a new run has started for example at 00:15.

Do not use the -p option with the door machine because it restarts automatically as soon as it is powered down, it is better to keep the system halted but still with power on.