This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: shutdown doesn't quite shut down..? From: Steve Borho <sborho@ststech.com> Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 10:01:26 -0500 On Wed, Jun 30, 1999 at 03:51:00PM +0100, KThorpe wrote: > >>I ran "shutdown -h now" - all went well and the message about > >>power down now displayed. However, I forgot to power down. > >>So my question is..what is lurking in the background after a shutdown? > > Parts of the kernel are still active. In fact I was pointed to this as a > feature by the linux router list to make an IP firewall with no active > processes to exploit. The kernel does ipfwadm and forwarding even after > a shutdown (at least on the version I tried). Yes, the kernel can still route packets after all user processes have been shutdown (although I think the Red Hat initscripts will disable IP forwarding and bring down the interface when you run 'shutdown'). However, part of the normal shutdown procedure is to unmount all your filesystems. Root (/) can't be unmounted, but it is remounted read-only so it is reboot-safe as well. Any filesystem corruption you got must have happened some other way. Either your shutdown never finished or one of your filesystems was somehow never unmounted. ===