Subject: Re: [vserver] Graceful shutdown problem
From: "Michael S. Zick" <mszick@morethan.org>
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 07:44:05 -0500

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