Hello everybody.
i'm experiencing some problems while shutting down the system.
Everything started when i had the (bad?) idea to try initng to get my computer booting faster. For those who don't know initng I can try to give a brief explanation of how it works.
Initng is a "successor" of the deprecated sysvinit, that should help you to load your system faster, but it does not rely on the usual init, it is a standalone program, with its own scripts. The only way to load it is to say the lilo do start using it instead of the usual init. The system did not start properly, but I wasn't too worried, because i knew that i only needed to remove the "append" string from lilo (or to comment it) to get my system working again. And that's what i did, i commented that line and lauched lilo, from root, then rebooted. The system loaded as i expected, apparently. Infact the first problem was that xfce wouldn't have started himself, while the permissions of /tmp where corrupted. That was not a problem, i made a "chmod -R 1777 /tmp" and got everything working.

Right now i have some worse problems, like not getting cdrecord working (i don't know if it's a problem that came from the initng script, but it started with initng ) having a message of warning that says that i am unable to uccess to scsi buffer (i/o error) and, most important, not getting the system to shut down. After he unmounts the devices he says something like "cannot access to /var/run/shutdown.pid : No such file or directory."
I watched on some other computer, none of them has got this file, so i suppose he creates it while shutting down, and then he has to access it. I'm pretty sure that i'm still having problems with permissions, anyway i checked /var permissions and they are ok (compared with another system that woks, and it is a slackware 10.1 too).

I hope you will be able to help me, and i thank you for your patience.

[root@system:#] shutdown -h now

--Abid Kazmi

yeah, i wish.
halt
shutdown -h now
poweroff


always the same problem.

What do you mean "I wish"...

--Abid Kazmi

i mean that it is not that easy to solve my problem. I already tried, as i explained.
and even being root :P

no idea? anyone? i'm all alone, i'm scared...


...i'm an idiot :P

help me, i have sons
well, not really, but...

What happens if you do
init 6 or init S
Make sure you use usual 'init'.

Then if same thing happens, follow scripts and which one hits that error,
otherwise you are no longer in trouble.

I only can guess and these are what I would do.

i just tried and i still get the same error. Thanks anyway!

any other idea? o_O

Can you post screendump?

initng just runs scripts in parrallel or as daemons. Its very easy to do with BSD or System-V setup. You just need to know how to run scripts as daemons and know which script(s) depends on others.

Lets say that we want SAMBA, SSH, HTTP, FTP to load up at startup using System-V setup. These services depends on the network being up. You just run the network script first. Next you run the serivces as follows:

samba &
ssh &
http &
ftp &

These scripts will run at the same time (parrallel) instead one at a time (serial) cutting the load time about 60%. The above is to show an example, so it may not be the same with other System-V init setups.

Some programs writes to /var/run to notify you what process id its using, so you can write scripts to use this information. This directory is usually emptied at bootup.

Probably re-installing or restoring from a backup will take less time than finding the gremlin.

http://img133.echo.cx/img133/7402/untitled9vz.jpg

i have no backup

Hm.../var/run/shutdown.pid. I guess if it doesn't exist, the command is linked incorrectly. I'm not sure how you can fix that but I'm sure someone will respond.

--Abid Kazmi

i hope so :P

Following messages come with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

Is that "error message" or "warning"?

It looks like that your shutdown script is messed up during your improvement work, which ended up havoc.

I am sure you have enough experience to check these scripts, as you have done "initing"

I would do Electro's suggestion, re-install these scripts.

What I meant, just re-install Linux if you do not have a backup to refer to. With all tinkering, always make a backup. You never know when a gremlin will ruin your night.