Is there a way to make init scripts have a timeout? I have a problem that sometimes some init script will hang on reboot which prevents the system from completing the reboot.
Thanks,

--Carlos

Could you please provide more info? Is this your own script that you installed in /etc/init.d or is it a system script that ships with the distribution? If your own, have you analyzed why the script hangs (what is it waiting for?).

In response to your original question, I'm not sure if there is a way to force a timeout, which is why I'm suggesting the steps above.

Sorry I guess I should have given a bit more info.

First, we are using Gentoo. We've added our own timeouts to any piece of code of ours which could hang. Pretty much the only thing we know hangs sometimes its our network bridge, whenever the system is shutting down it stops at "stopping net.br0" and it won't move from there. This only happens every so often, probably less than 5% of the time however our systems are all remote and we can't really have them hanging on reboots when we aren't there to manually fix them.

We actually think we have a fix for the net.br0 hanging but we are assuming thats the only piece of the shutdown cycle that hangs. If there were other pieces hanging it would be very helpful if we could just have a global timeout for all the init scripts. Is there such a thing?

Thanks,

--Carlos

I'm not sure if this will help, but it sound like a good description of your problem:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157498

Wow that really sounds like it. Thanks for the good find. I'm testing right now to see if I have the same problem by restarting net.br0 on a loop.

That still leaves us wanting to timeout all init scripts in case other are failing to stop and we just don't know about it but we may wait until we fix the net.br0 and are certain others are a problem.

Thanks,

--Carlos