best practices question - shutdown vs. reboot

[Jeff Nyberg]

Hi-
I am forced by a software package's licensing structure to reboot my K-box once per week. I read that the shutdown command should be used over the reboot command because it is a smoother shutdown. If I use shutdown -r is that the same as the reboot command, or does it shut things down properly and then simply restart?

In a perfect world which would you use?
shutdown -hy 0
shutdown -ry 0
reboot -??

Thanks in advance for your advice!

Jeff

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Shutdown -r -y 0 would be my preference because this causes an orderly shutdown going through all the rc kill scripts; however; my real preference would be to contact the software vendor and demand a fix. I never tolerate sloppy software. Weekly rebbot are not acceptable; you are fixing the symptoms not the problem.

[Kevin Wright]

reboot doesn't run through the rc scripts, it basically does a kill on all process. Shutdown calls init, which runs through all the rc scripts shutting down processes correctly. I have to wonder why you must reboot once a week though, very strange. but to answer your question..
shutdown -ry now should be perfomed.

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hello,

Shutdown -hy would halt the system. This is usefull during hardware maintainance

shutdown -ry will shoutdown the server and the restart it clean safe way.

I would go for shutdown -ry

-Goodluck,
-USA..

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hi again,

BTW, Why this software need weekly reboot..?? You should not boot the server weekly to fix software vendor's bug!!

[Sandip Ghosh]

Hi Jeff,

shutdown -hy 0 will halt the system
shutdown -ry 0 will reboot the system in a proper way by executing the rc scripts
and
reboot will do the shutdown abruptly and reboot the server. There may be a chance of corruption in this case.

I think your application has some memory leakage for which your Software vendor has told you to reboot the server once in a week. By reboot they mean to say shutdown -ry 0.

Sandip

[Jeff Nyberg]

shutdown -ry it is.......

thanks again

[melvyn burnard]

NEVER use reboot to shut a system down unless you ar eabsolutley confident nothing of importance is running, or you are in single user mode.
It basically issues kill -9 to all processes remaining, which is very inelegant

As per the man page, the -r option to the shutdown command calls the reboot command once it has finished the systematic and orderly halt of most functions.

I also agree that the vendor should fix this software that requires you to restart the system weekly.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I prefer reboot because it's quick!

I also don't have any users on most of my systems nor do I have any apps that require graceful shutdowns....

Later,
Bill