When I bring down a certain machine with some nfs mounts using init 0, it hangs forever while trying to bring down the mounts, but if I bring it down using halt -p (which I've read just calls shutdown if I'm in init 3), it comes down in a timely manner. I've also read that shutdown still calls all the rc.d kill scripts just like init 0, so what is actually the difference between them? Is it this: ? Does init not do that?

I'm not trying to directly troubleshoot why NFS makes me hang with init 0 at this point, just wondering why shutdown works whereas init 0 doesn't.

Have you examined /var/log/messages to see what, if any, error messages are logged in re the use of init 0?

Thanks for your reply. Briefly, didn't see anything useful, but I'm not really interested in fixing the NFS hanging issue at the moment, I'm more curious about why init 0 doesn't work while shutdown does when I always thought they were pretty much aliases for the same command. Can someone confirm if these are these commands are in fact different in some significant way?

That sounds like an issue with the way the NFS share is being exported or mounted. Sometimes the "sync" option can cause issues. Can you post the server's /etc/exports file and your local /etc/fstab file?


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I think shutdown is more of a script that does a controlled shutdown (sic)
http://linux.die.net/man/8/shutdown

init just does it ; you should really use telinit http://linux.die.net/man/8/init.

Actually, I'd stick to shutdown for shutting down; also covers reboot and halt in a controlled manner...