Re: [vserver] Graceful shutdown problem

On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 08:05 -0500, Michael S. Zick wrote:
> On Wed May 13 2009, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 07:44 -0500, Michael S. Zick wrote:
> > > On Wed May 13 2009, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> > > > Hello, all. We are having a problem with graceful shutdown of our
> > > > vservers. For example, one of our vservers is a Zimbra email system.
> > > > It is set to start and stop as part of vservers-default. Since email
> > > > systems can take quite a while to shut down, we created
> > > > a /etc/vservers/zimbra1/apps/vshelper/sync-timeout file and with
> > > > contents of:
> > > > 900
> > > >
> > > > However, if we shutdown the vserver host, e.g., halt -p, we notice the
> > > > default server shutdown is very fast - much too fast to be adequate for
> > > > Zimbra. As a result, when the server reboots, we have serious damage to
> > > > the email database.
> > > >
> > > > Other than some kludge such as inserting a long sleep sequence in a
> > > > shutdown script, is there an elegant way of giving the vservers adequate
> > > > time to shut down when the host is shut down? Thanks - John
> > > >
> > >
> > > Would it be possible to make the e-mail server send you (system root) a
> > > "I am dead" e-mail as the last action in closing out the pending mail files?
> > > Or maybe "watch" for its pid file to disappear?
> > >
> > > Mike
> > >
> > >
> > That's a good idea; we could create a script in the shutdown sequence
> > that will sleep as long as the pid exists. But I wonder if there is
> > something built into vserver that I missed which would create a more
> > graceful shutdown. I thought that's what sync-timeout does but I must
> > have guessed wrongly! Thanks - John
>
> The utility library, libevent, should let you write a "Goodbye World" style
> program that will block until the pid file disappears.
>
> Mike
>
>
Thanks again. The downside is I must do this for each vserver. I'm
hoping there is something within vserver which will do this for all
vservers automatically, this being shut them down gracefully. If not,
we will resort to your very helpful suggestion - John

-- 
John A. Sullivan III
Open Source Development Corporation
+1 207-985-7880
jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com
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