On 10/10/06, Clive Gould <clive at ce.bromley.ac.uk> wrote: > We have a mission critical Dell rackmount server. > > I tried to reboot it via an ssh session and it just kept running! > > The command I used was: > > [root at vle tmp]# shutdown -r now > > Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Tue Oct 10 08:28:44 2006): > > The system is going down for reboot NOW! > > Looking at /var/log/messages it says: > > Oct 10 08:28:44 vle shutdown: shutting down for system reboot > > But the server just keeps on running!!! Check the running processes with either "ps -efl" or "ps auxww", look for references to shutdown/init and try to figure out what's going on. I'd guess there's an uninterruptible process running, init's trying to stop it but can't. You need to find it and try killing it, possibly a "kill -9" though be careful you know what it is you're killing. You could also try "init 6" or "reboot -f" to see if either of those will successfully restart your system. Will.