[SLL] RH 6.2-- shutdown -r now fails; reboot works

[John W Baxter]

We either just had (on a rather troubled machine) the appearance of a
situation in which
   shutdown -r now
failed (twice), whereas
   reboot
worked.

"Failed" means that my SSH session from afar stayed connected, and the
machine otherwise stayed as alive as it was already.

"Appearance" means that a coincidence is possible:  the first shutdown
might have been delayed by some problem process, or something like that,
and *happened* to do the actual reboot thing just as I typed reboot.

"Troubled" means that named was running but non-responsive...even after
having been restarted (as a canary, I keep a machine whose only name
service comes from the problem machine's name server, which is what alerted
me).  Several other services were also seemingly unhappy, including a
little private web server which pumps out MRTG graphs.

The machine is running a fully-updated (AFAIK) RH 6.2, to which we've added
BIND 8.2.3 from RH's RPM.  The machine had only been up for 35 days:
hardly out of diapers.

I have the boss (the Tripwire expert) looking into whether the shutdown
binary shows signs of compromise.

TIA for any insight into the shutdown thing.

  --John

-- 
John Baxter   jwblist at olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA

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