On Wed May 13 2009, John A. Sullivan III wrote: > 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 The utility library, libevent, should let you write a "Goodbye World" style program that will block until the pid file disappears. Mike