Re: Indicator that a machine's shut down?

From: Moe Trin (ibuprofin_at_painkiller.example.tld)
Date: 03/22/05

  • Next message: Floyd L. Davidson: "Re: Power Supply Cause of Crashes? (Review)" 
    Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 18:16:14 -0600

    In article <pan.2005.03.21.11.31.23.445298@remove.this.yahoo.co.uk>,
    Jules wrote:

    >I've got a server here that runs headless. On the rare occasions that I
    >need to shut it down, it'd be nice if there was a way it'd light some sort
    >of indicator when it was safe to turn the machine off (it's not capable of
    >turning itself off).

    Normally what we do on these boxes is just to come in remotely, and run
    a 'shutdown -h +2' which says to shutdown in two minutes. That gives us
    the time to log out, walk to the server, and watch it (and listen to it)
    shut down. About about ten seconds after the drives stop thrashing, it
    should be safe to turn of. You may want to consider adding some sort of
    serial connection to a normally working computer. This gives you not only
    the equivalent of a console, but it also gives you a second way to shut
    down, in the event of the network (or network card) going spherical on you.

    >A quick LED / resistor on one of the parallel port lines, say, which is
    >driven as the last thing that's done when the machine is shutting down.

    That will certainly work.

    >Has anyone done such a thing in the past? It *looks* to be as simple as
    >writing a quick C prog to drive the parallel port (trivial) and sticking
    >a call to it in rc.0 as the last thing that's done before "poweroff" is
    >called.

    If the system has a keyboard attacked, you can also write something that
    toggles one of the keyboard LEDs - the scroll lock indicator is probably
    not needed.

    >Just want to check I'm not missing something, though :-)

    I've always preferred to have a serial console of some kind. The DMZ
    hosts here have this (see the Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO) through
    cascaded 'A/B/C/D' switches, allowing 16 systems to be monitored and
    controlled with a single dumb terminal.

            Old guy

  • Next message: Floyd L. Davidson: "Re: Power Supply Cause of Crashes? (Review)"

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