Alarm calls during shutdown

[Dan Rosen]

I have noticed that when I must shutdown the server, I am getting some alarm calls as it tries to reach init level S. Initially, I will issue "shutdown" which proceeds along. Then it times out trying to go to init S.

If I issue a "shutdown -r" at this point, it will reboot. I have looked for alarm call numbers, but could not find them.

I get two alarm calls: 7666 and 7678 on the system as it tries to reboot.

I can't see any major issues caused by this, and I reboot infrequently, but I would like to solve the mystery of what is causing this.

TIA

[Pedro Sousa]

Hi Dan!
Sorry if I understood it badly but, why don't you run a shutdown -ry to reboot your system instead of first going to ingle user mode? Or does your system force you to it?

These alarms normally mean that you have zombie processes.

from a doc (I don't remember wich one):

shutdown: "PID" Alarm call

The system has a process that wall(1) identifies as a user process. The command tries to send it the backup starting message, covered by an alarm so it will not hang. The message fails, the alarm goes off, and you get
the message. You can reboot the system to get rid of the defunct process. Also, you can sometimes read or write to the offending pty.
For example, either of the following commands:

cat /dev/pty/ttyp2 > /dev/null

cat /etc/hosts > /dev/pty/ttyp2

hope this helps.