planned shutdown failure

[bassey essien_1]

our system is regularly sheduled to shutdown
for a nightly backup everyday. I noticed this morning that the system did not go off as planned, there are no error messages on the syslog and dmesg tools, the swap space and the
var directory is not full and the backup did not run as scheduled.Also checked the /var/adm/crash directory and came up with no error log. What could have happened ?, the system is up and running this morning.
Any suggestion will be appreciated.
thanks.

[Robert Gamble]

bassey,

does the shutdown occur with a cron ? cron should mail any error messages to root.

ensure the cron job is in the crontab file.

good luck!

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Check /var/adm/cron/log file for the cron logs and also check mails for root or do a mtail or mailx when logged in as root.

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

Bassey:

it is possible that your script that does the backup is still running! do a ps -ef and look for the script in the list.

If something happened that made the script hang (eg. waiting for the database to shutdown etc.) the script will typically not continue until it has succeeded. so I would examine the processes and make sure that the backup script is not still running.

If it is still running, you would have to kill it (ie. the parent) before killing any child processes otherwise, if you kill the children first, it might reboot while you are still logged on :-)

so, I would say examine your ps -ef closely.

good luck.
PS. let's know what it was will you?

[James R. Ferguson]

Bassey:

Make sure, if you haven't, that your current working directory is at root ("/") and that /etc/shutdown.allow has an entry for the user and system attempting the shutdown.

...JRF...

[f. halili]

If the cron runs the standard err for it is to send it via mail. Check root/user's mail that does reboot.
#cat var/mail/root

It's also possible that user that do the reboot has its crontab file remove.
#crontab -l