Debian – NAS not shutting down

debiannaspowershutdown

I'm running a network attached storage appliance (Iomega ix2-200) which is running some sort of Debian variant. Recently, the unit has been unable to shutdown cleanly, either via the web interface or by pressing the power button on the unit itself. It goes through the shutdown processes (killing SSH, samba, http daemons) but it hangs at a point I can't determine.

The unit flashes a small white LED when shutting down and this LED does not stop flashing. The drives do not power down, but there is no activity (at least that I can hear – it's usually quite noisy when reading/writing). Pressing the power button again at this stage does nothing, and the only way I can power the device back on is by pulling the power and reinserting it. Interestingly, when I pull the power and boot it back up the device doesn't complain with its "Oh I had an unsafe shutdown" email which it normally does if I yank the power supply.

Is this something I should be concerned with? The data on this NAS is quite valuable and I don't have a unit to backup to (this was the unit!). If it's a typical sign of these failing then I will go out and buy a new one.

Has anyone got any idea how to determine the shutdown process in the way of logs etc on a Debian operating system?

Update
The last two messages the device gets in /var/log/messages are the following:

Aug 24 11:06:44 Ruth shutdown[5945]: shutting down for system halt

Aug 24 11:06:44 Ruth init: Switching to runlevel: 0

Best Answer

It looks like the system is going down for "halt", which does not always mean it's going down for poweroff. This could be a BIOS/ACPI thing, but it could also simply be the fact that the device has shut of and is waiting for the power to cut out (remember the old days when after shutdown the system used to show you a message saying "It is now safe to power down the system" or something similar? That's what I'm thinking is going on.)

2 possible workarounds;

  • If you have access to a root shell, enter the command shutdown -hP now and see if it actually shuts of this time.
  • Force ACPI; I don't know much about NAS equipment, but I'm figuring it'd have some kind of boot loader (maybe even just GRUB). Add this as a kernel option; acpi=force, reboot the device (does running reboot from a root shell reboot it or does it still just hang after shutdown?), and try the shutdown -hP now command.

Edit: Oh, wow. I seem to be quite late, don't I? :p

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