`shutdown -r now` command completely shutting down instead of restarting

Question

Hi we've just installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS onto a new server. It's on a SuperMicro X9SCA-f Motherboard .

Now we're aiming to locate this in a remote server room - however when we execute a shutdown -r now the system completly shuts down and has to be restarted using the power button!! I cant find any BIOS setting that seems applicable.

Any help/pointers greatly appreciated.

Solution

Restart using init:

sudo init 6

The init 6 command gracefully reboots the system running all the K* shutdown scripts first, before rebooting. The reboot command does a very quick reboot. It doesn’t execute any kill scripts, but just unmounts filesystems and restarts the system.

Comments

[Admin]

Have you tried "reboot" ?

[Admin]

Behaviour of shutdown is a setting in Ubuntu not in BIOS.

[Admin]

As a workaround tour could just use 'sudo reboot'.

[Admin]

reboot does exactly the same :-(

[Admin]

While this is not a duplicate but the opposite from why-cant-i-restart-shutdown the answers there might provide a clue for you too.

[Admin]

I am really curious to know Why 'shutdown -r' doesn't reboot the server !! Can anyone tell us why ?

[Admin]

The only thing I could think of is that perhaps there's something reinterpreting your command and adding some extra switches? As in, an alias in a ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc file?

[Admin]

Something is going on here, it looks like halt is being called instead of reboot. Please use strace to log all the actors on behalf of shutdown. <pre> strace -f /sbin/shutdown -r > /root/shutdown-trace.out 2>&1 </pre>

[Eliah Kagan]

This is incorrect. reboot is only more abrupt than init 6 or shutdown -r now if you use reboot --force (or equivalently reboot -f). Normal operation of reboot (when run simply with sudo reboot) is to invoke shutdown, which in turn invokes init to change the runlevel. See man 8 reboot and man 8 shutdown for details. In other words, it is simply false to say that K* scripts are not run when rebooting with sudo reboot. They are.