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I have a computer running Ubuntu 14.04.05. It is scheduled in BIOS to power ON every day at 5am and in case of powerloss (APM settings). It is also scheduled in sudo crontab with command

shutdown -h now

to shutdown every day at 23:55. So basically every night it shutdown, in the morning poweron, do its "work" and poweroff again..and so on.. I had no physical access to it, and something bad happened: no "work" (which I check remotely) done since 2nd december... I got this computer in my hands today and started to investigate. Looking at the logs there is no activity since 1st December (syslog, kern.log), but the person who brought me the computer, found it powered ON...

last -x | grep shutdown | less

shows

shutdown system down 4.4.0-47-generic Thu Dec 1 23:55 15:38 (14+15:43)

Which let me think that somehow the system hanged in the shutdown of 1st december.. am I right? Is there something else to do to go deep? In the log files there is nothing after the shutdown commands, no errors, no warnings..

EDIT

I would like to give more details.. this computer runs contiously a software (QT+OpenCV+OpenNI) with a camera Asus Xtion Pro live, to do some image processing and send data over the network. Is it possible that shutdown somethimes can not kill the application, or hangs on putting down USB interface? It's just a guess, but this came in my mind.. I don't know where to look in the log files...

Thank you

EDIT 2

These are the last lines of syslog, as you can see there is nothing bad, and are the same for 1st and 16th of December.

Dec  1 23:55:01 blabla CRON[14598]: (root) CMD (sudo shutdown -h now)
Dec  1 23:55:01 blabla rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="7.4.4" x-pid="511" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] exiting on signal 15.

Kern.log has last entry at 7.20 am so in the morning, and it's nothing relevant.

However checking the man page of shutdown command it says for option -h:

Requests that the system be either halted or powered off after it has been brought down, with the choice as to which left up to the system.

So I suspect that in some situation the system with this option choose to halt the system (this could be the situation where the computer reimained since 1st December to 16th of December) instead of power it off. But, What are the criteria for the choise?

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  • my linux is a bit rusty, but shutdown -h now is hibernation, right?
    – LPChip
    Dec 16, 2016 at 18:06
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    no it's not.. Ubuntu manual says for -h option: Requests that the system be either halted or powered off after it has been brought down, with the choice as to which left up to the system.
    – rok
    Dec 18, 2016 at 10:29
  • The desired logs should be in /var/log/syslog and /var/log/kern.log. If you could post the lines concerning Dec 1st and Dec 2nd, that would be helpful! Dec 22, 2016 at 14:47
  • see my edit please-
    – rok
    Dec 23, 2016 at 11:29

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