Hi,

I have been tasked with providing a method of shutting down our Linux + Unix farms in a simple way. This would be used in the event of an air conditioning failure, UPS failure or some other disaster which required us to shut everything down quickly.

We are running a mixture of Linux distros, Red Hat 7-9, Mandrake 10, Solaris 7-9. I would like to know if anyone else has got a method for performing such shutdowns - I don't want to start reinventing the wheel.

I have full root access to all the machine, so access is not a problem. I'd don't want a monitoring daemon running which is waiting to shut the box down (for obvious reasons).

My initial thoughts on the problem was to use a script issued from one machine which would open ssh sessions on the other machines and issue the shutdown command. Does anyone have anything like this that they could share with me? Or do you have another insight into this?

Many thanks in advance for any help

Sam Roberts

Hmm, i'm not very familiar with shell scripting since i'm still learning, but perhaps this can still help you:

Expect:
http://expect.nist.gov/

it's an automation program for tasks such as yours. I know you don't want a daemon but perhaps it's still of some use? (Like, see what the program produces, copy it and create something useful out of it)

Many thanks for this, I found a few scripts on t'Internet which people had already written which open an ssh session to a machine.

For interest, and in case anyone else asks the question, I've included an example script in this post. From this, it is pretty trivial to set the script up to connect to many servers and issue the shutdown command. I'm going to put servers in different groups so I can apply some order to the shutdown process.

To get this to work, I had to install Expect and TCL onto a Red Hat 7.3 machine. Haven't tried it on the Solaris machines yet but I can't see this being a problem.

Thanks again for your help.

Sam

#=================================================#
#!/usr/local/bin/expect

package require Expect

spawn ssh servername -l root
expect "password: "
send "my_password\r"
expect "*#"
send "who;uname -a\r"
expect "*#"
send "exit\r"
#==EOF============================================#

One is glad to be of service