Subject: Re: [vserver] Graceful shutdown problem
From: "John A. Sullivan III" <jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com>
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 08:49:32 -0400

On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 07:44 -0500, Michael S. Zick wrote:
> On Wed May 13 2009, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> > Hello, all.  We are having a problem with graceful shutdown of our
> > vservers.  For example, one of our vservers is a Zimbra email system.
> > It is set to start and stop as part of vservers-default.  Since email
> > systems can take quite a while to shut down, we created
> > a /etc/vservers/zimbra1/apps/vshelper/sync-timeout file and with
> > contents of:
> > 900
> > 
> > However, if we shutdown the vserver host, e.g., halt -p, we notice the
> > default server shutdown is very fast - much too fast to be adequate for
> > Zimbra.  As a result, when the server reboots, we have serious damage to
> > the email database.
> > 
> > Other than some kludge such as inserting a long sleep sequence in a
> > shutdown script, is there an elegant way of giving the vservers adequate
> > time to shut down when the host is shut down? Thanks - John
> >
> 
> Would it be possible to make the e-mail server send you (system root) a
> "I am dead" e-mail as the last action in closing out the pending mail files?
> Or maybe "watch" for its pid file to disappear?
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
That's a good idea; we could create a script in the shutdown sequence
that will sleep as long as the pid exists.  But I wonder if there is
something built into vserver that I missed which would create a more
graceful shutdown.  I thought that's what sync-timeout does but I must
have guessed wrongly! Thanks - John
-- 
John A. Sullivan III
Open Source Development Corporation
+1 207-985-7880
jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com

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