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

Administering a System: Booting and Shutdown
Shutting Down Systems
Chapter 5 521
inconsistent with the “total picture” of what the file system should
look like (pointers pointing to the wrong place, inodes not properly
updated, etc.).
❏ The system might have users logged into it from remote locations.
These users might be in the middle of important work when the
system is turned off. Consequently, their work will be interrupted
and important data could be lost.
❏ If the system is in a network, it might be serving important network
functions such as being a network gateway, a file server, or a network
name server. Shutting down a system could have consequences
beyond the scope of that system.
Example
In the MSW sample network (see “The MSW Network (Overview)” on
page 67), the computer called flserver is a member of both the
15. nn . xx and the 15. nn . yy subnetworks (subnets). It is serving as a
network gateway computer. If it were not running, systems in the
15. nn . xx subnet could not communicate with systems in the 15. nn . yy
subnet.
Ready . . . Set . . . Go!
As with the famous saying that starts many foot races, there is a definite
order that you must follow to shut down your system, or you could have
problems.
When shutting down an HP-UX system:
1. First, notify everyone who is likely to be affected by the shutdown,
giving them a chance to complete work in progress, and if necessary
unmount file systems that were NFS-mounted from your system.
2. Then, shutdown all programs that you might be running (save files
and close editor windows, shut down graphics modeling programs,
etcetera).
3. Finally, use the shutdown program to shut down the system. The
shutdown program first syncs the file systems (writes all memory
buffers to disk and updates the superblock of each affected file
system) so that the file systems will be properly intact when the
system reboots.