Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Booting and Shutdown
Shutting Down Systems
Chapter 5520
Shutting Down Systems
• “Overview of the Shutdown Process” on page 520
• “Types of Shutdown” on page 522
— “Normal (Planned) Shutdown” on page 522
— “Power Failure” on page 525
— “Unclean Shutdowns” on page 526
— “System Crashes / HP-UX Panics” on page 527
• “Special Considerations for Shutting Down Certain Systems” on
page 528
— “Mail Server” on page 528
— “Name Server” on page 528
— “Network Gateway” on page 529
— “NFS File Server” on page 529
— “NFS Client” on page 530
— “NFS Cluster Server” on page 530
— “NFS Cluster Client” on page 530
• “Avoiding a Shutdown When Possible” on page 530
• “Booting Systems” on page 464
Overview of the Shutdown Process
CAUTION Do NOT turn off an HP-UX system, without first properly shutting it
down! Though most modern systems will properly shut down when you
hit the power switch, be safe and do not assume your system will. Use
the /usr/sbin/shutdown command instead.
There are several important reasons for this warning:
❏ While HP-UX is running, information regarding recent file system
changes is cached in memory. Periodically the memory buffers in
the cache are written to disk by a program called sync. If
information about file system changes is in memory, and not yet
written to disk when the system goes down, the file system on disk is