On Wed, 2011-04-06 at 11:06 +0100, James Bensley wrote: > Hi List, > We power on servers at night via IPMI and shut them down the same way > for automation. The problem I'm facing is that the servers are > shutdown in about 2 seconds. IPMI provides remote access to the power > features as we know so I don't think the OS has a chance to do a > 'graceful' shutdown. ??? Why are you doing this? Don't do this. Just do a "shutdown" at the OS level - which will power off the server on 99.44% of hardware. Then power-on using IPMI. > One server in particular is told to shutdown at say 07:00am, the last > scheduled task on there should finish around 06:30 so there is a half > hour window for over run. It now has a corrupt XFS file system which I > am repairing as we speak. I am wondering if this could be a possible > cause of these problems? Yes. What you are doing is *evil*. > Perhaps if that last tasks over runs a couple > of times and it gets powered off in the middle of the tasks? (These > are backup servers rsyncing from other servers) Not to mention that your task possibly didn't finish. > Does anyone here have problems with this? Yes. What you are doing is bad and wrong. "shutdown -h now" will give you an immediate shutdown and power-off the box. You can also schedule shutdown via shutdown, see "man shutdown".