CentOS 5 remote shutdown

ratcateme · 02-03-2008, 07:23 PM

i have 5 CentOS servers and my employer is going green and wants all PC's including the servers turned off at night. I want to know is there a way i can issue a command on one server or a windows PC on the Broadcast address or something to turn my serves off.

Scott.

khaos83 · 02-03-2008, 09:14 PM

Not really sure how you want the shutdown to work ...
so i'm throwing everything I can find to you

All about shutdown
http://linux.about.com/od/linux101/l/blnewbie3_1_5.htm

Or you can do a cron job that runs a simple script every interval. The script is empty initially. But when you want it to shutdown, you have to somehow edit it to run the shutdown command. So at the next schedule, the script will shutdown the system. The interesting part is WHERE the script will be. It can be local or in a shared drive.

khaos83 · 02-03-2008, 09:15 PM

NOTE, you may have to specify the path of the shutdown command
not really sure.
may not have to ..

chrism01 · 02-04-2008, 10:39 PM

So long as you can agree a definite time, cron on the linux systems is simplest.
Add it to the root's cron and do use the full pathname. cron confuses a lot of people by having extremely minimal envronment/path settings.

slacksite · 02-11-2008, 03:32 PM

Why not do something like:

ssh -l root host.domain.com /sbin/shutdown -h now

ncsuapex · 03-09-2008, 02:55 PM

Do you want it to also restart the server in the AM automatically? Or will someone manually power the servers up?

chrism01 · 03-12-2008, 01:36 AM

slacksite: generally, remote login as root is discouraged these day, due to the large num of scripts attempting to break in from the net.
I believe more recent version of eg RH/Centos (and others) turn it off in the relevant ssh server config file for a default install.
However, you could use a script like that to login to user that has been given privs via sudo to do the job.
You could automate it using 'expect' or use ssh auth keys, so no passwd is reqd.

elimkh · 03-19-2008, 12:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01

So long as you can agree a definite time, cron on the linux systems is simplest.
Add it to the root's cron and do use the full pathname. cron confuses a lot of people by having extremely minimal envronment/path settings.

chris: hi, I'm pretty new to this forum but was following this thread while looking for some good advise on shutdown using crontab. I edit the crontab table with this:

0 23 * * * /sbin/shutdown -h now

But somehow it does not seems to work. I have the root access to the centos 5.0 server. Any suggestion, please? Thanks.

chrism01 · 03-20-2008, 01:32 AM

Is that in your crontab or root's crontab ? Normally you have to be root to do that.

elimkh · 03-23-2008, 10:52 PM

Hi Chris,

It's the root crontab. Anyway, I finally got it to work, somehow when you edit your crontab to test, you cannot timed it like a few minute later. I have set crontab for the last couple of evening and it seems to ok now. Thanks!

Cheers mate!