Ubuntu shutdown fail “* Killing all remaining processes…”

Question

I have a fresh installation of Ubuntu Server. "reboot" works, but shutdown fails on the * Killing all remaining processes... step. I am using:

sudo shutdown now

After the failure, indicated by [fail] (with "fail" in red), I get this message:

 * will now switch to single-user mode

with no other error messages. The user is root after the program exits.

Any ideas about how to trouble-shoot this, or what the problem might be?

The Ubuntu version is 11.10 and I ran sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade before this.

Answer 1

I've experienced the same, so I had to use halt which worked

shutdown -h now

Answer 2

From the man pages of shutdown: "... runlevel 1 is used to put to system into a state where administrative tasks can be per- formed; this is the default if neither the -h or -r flag is given to shutdown."

Shutdown shuts the system down from a user perspective, as linux is designed as a multi-user-system. Therefore the system-wide message and optional time delay. To shut down the machine us, as already said, the -h option.

And I wouldn't worry about some processes that couldn't be killed in time, what probably is the meaning of the [fail]-msg you get.