Shutdown doesn't shutdown

Question

I have an annoying issue on my SunBlade 1000 running Solaris 9. and whenever I need to reboot/shutdown this box (which doesn't happen often) I run into it.
When I use the shutdown command I see the warning message and that is it. The machine keeps running along merily. Using init doesn't help either.
So far the only way I fount to shut this box down is using:
sync
sync
halt
But I'd like to close things a bit cleaner. Anyone got a suggestion what might be causing this?
thanx

Answer 1

The "sync; sync; halt" commands use to be fairly common back in the SunOS 4.x days. I wouldn't recommend it now. Although it will sync filesystems, it certainly won't shutdown any applications gracefully.
The shutdown command (depending on the options) indirectly runs through the scripts in your various /etc/rc*.d directories. The default run level in solaris is typically run level three. shutdown will step you down from this level by issuing running calling the /etc/rc2 script with a stop option.
My first suggestion would be to call this script manually.
/etc/rc2 stop
-This script will then go through the /etc/rc2.d directory and run each script which starts with a capital K (which stands for kill) in alphabetical/numerical order.
Your system could be hanging on one of these scripts. If it continues, try the next run level stop script.
/etc/rc1 stop
/etc/rc0 stop
Even if this doesn't show you what is screwing up shutdown, it'll be a much cleaner way to shutdown your system.
Good luck!