Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

How do I find out who or what halted my system (Old Sco Unix)?

First, look in crontab for a call to haltsys or init. Someone may have added this for silly reasons.

If you think some privileged user or process has run /etc/haltsys, add these lines to it right after the PATH= line

 {
 echo $0 `tty` `id`
 MYPROC=$$
 NEXTPROC=$MYPROC
 while [ $NEXTPROC != 0 ]
 do
 ps -lp $NEXTPROC
 MYPROC=$NEXTPROC
 NEXTPROC=`ps -p $MYPROC -o "ppid=" `
 done 
 } | mail -s "haltsys was run" root
 

This will give you a full trace of where it was called from. You can use a similar technique with /etc/shutdown.

You might also write a "K" script and put it in /etc/rc0.d. Unfortunately, by that time there isn't as much information to glean from the system. Adding to /etc/rc0 doesn't gain you much either, but at least you know it was not a crash and you *might* still see a suspect process in a ps listing.

If your only concern is when the system went down,

who -a /etc/wtmp | grep uadmin
 

will give you that. Note that on "out of the box" systems, the information in /etc/wtmp is cleared out weekly by a cron job that runs /etc/cleanup; you may want to adjust this script if you need longer records.

Jeff Hyman tells me that the old 3.2v4.2 "last" included shutdown information, so

last | grep shutdown
 

would work on those releases. It doesn't on OSR5.

Bela Lubkin commented:

Change this to:

    } | mail -s "$0 $@ was run" root
    sync
    sleep 5
    sync

The sync and pause routine is necessary because mail delivery can take a
while (especially if you've installed spamassassin ;-), you don't want
to fire off mail when you know the very next thing you're doing is
shutting down.

> This will give you a full trace of where it was called from. You can use 
> a similar technique with /etc/shutdown.

This is true enough, but misses /etc/reboot as well as /etc/uadmin.

_All_ of the SCO-provided shutdown techniques (init [056], shutdown,
haltsys, reboot) eventually funnel through /etc/uadmin.  So the best way
to do this is to move /etc/uadmin to /etc/uadmin.real and use the above
script bit as /etc/uadmin, ending it with:

  exec /etc/uadmin.real "$@"

The `ps` chain is cute, but unnecessary -- better to give `ps -elf`
output and let the reader figure out the chaining.  The actual cause of
shutdown might not be in the parenthood of the process doing the
shutdown.  (e.g. if someone ran `sd shutdown`.)  So the entire script
can be reduced to:

  #!/bin/sh
  {
    echo Process $$, on tty `tty`, user `id`, ran:
    echo "  $0 $@"
    echo
    ps -elf
  } | mail -s "uadmin was run" root
  sync; sleep 5; sync
  exec /etc/uadmin.real "$@" # "real" /etc/uadmin was renamed /etc/uadmin.real

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