Hi All,

We are in the process of moving from building A to building B. We have close to 100 Linux servers. It can take close to two hours just to shut each of the server down. I was thinking about writing cronjob to shut the server down.

This will be in the file.


netstat -rn > /root/netstat_info.txt
ps -ef > /root/psef_info.txt
shutdown -h 5

Anything else I need?

Thats a question we really cant answer, but a simple power off/power on shouldn't be too big of a change. I make a copy of pretty much everything when doing patching or refreshing a server to new hardware.

I would suggest you look at using at or specifying the shutdown command with a specific time as opposed to scheduling a cron, the point being here is that if you forget to remove one of the cron entries on one of your servers at some point in time it will run the cron again and shut it down.

another quick question, for the crontab Does this looks correct? I want to do this on July 21 at 6 AM.

00 06 21 07 05 /root/move_shutdown.sh

You could use a cron for this but the "best practice" would be to not use cron here.

Would do what you want and it would only run it that one time, no need to remember to remove the crontab entry.

Just to add something that's bitten me in the past (and something you're probably already doing)...make absolutely SURE you have good, verified backups before doing a shutdown.

I have suffered at the hands of thermal shock twice. Hard drives that are up and spinning 24/7 for a long time, heat up, and naturally wear. A quick reboot is fine...but off for several hours, being moved, and brought into a cool new server room, can cause the drives to seize, and not come back up. We recovered once by heating an array with a hair-dryer, and things started working, but the other time, data was lost. Just FYI.