Ubuntu shutdown fail "* Killing all remaining processes..."

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.

Solution 1:

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

shutdown -h now

Solution 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, hence the system-wide message and optional time delay.

To shutdown the machine, use the -h option.

And I wouldn't worry about some processes that couldn't be killed in time, which is probably the meaning of the [fail] message you got.

Solution 3:

I encountered this when trying to reboot with sudo reboot now. sudo shutdown now also failed. In both cases, the system switched to single-user mode and stalled.

Halting the system isn't feasible, since it is remote and I don't want to trek to the basement to turn it back on. What worked is sudo shutdown -r 0.

I'm running Ubuntu 13.04 server on an Asus Aspire One netbook.

I know this thread is old, but I'm experiencing this problem with a current distro.