Properly Preparing Your System for Shutdown
Fortunately for the typical HP 3000 system administrator, rebooting the operating system is a fairly irregular occurrence. Simply by its infrequent nature rebooting is a problem waiting to happen. Written documentation and automated procedures make the task easy and reliable. Substantial thought goes into documenting system startup procedures. But just how much consideration has been applied to system shutdown routines? Properly shutting down MPE is crucial to the viability of the system after it is rebooted. To this end we have written a pre-shutdown command file that you should execute each time you shut your system down. This script will prepare the system for shutdown giving you the best chance to reach the “(SHUT 6)” message and make the system ready for the subsequent reboot. Its features are:
- Shut down ESP/3000 performance data collector.
- Check to make sure that the creator of SYSSTART is MANAGER.SYS
- Check to see if there are any non-validated sections of NMCONFIG and validate them accordingly.
- Stop all network services.
- Make a copy of the current booted configuration group in case CONFIG.SYS is messed up and you need to recover. It is much faster to reboot from a different group than to find an SLT and perform an UPDATE CONFIG
- Remind the user that they may want an SLT and backup and/or configuration listing if they are shutting down for the purpose of hardware maintenance. Optionally, it will produce an SLT and provide a configuration list.
Ideally this script would be executed after you have logged off all of your users, all background processes have been gracefully brought down, and batch jobs have completed.
I urge you to seriously consider adding this to your shutdown procedures, or, if you currently have no formal procedures, use this as a starting point. You can obtain a copy of the script here http://www.beechglen.com/pub/preshut.txt.