system will not shutdown

[preece at ccvaxa.UUCP]

>	We seem to be having a problem with /etc/shutdown.  To shut
>	the system down, I usually use the command:
>
>	/etc/shutdown -h +5 "comment"
>
>	Shutdown starts, gives back its pid number, then just hangs there
>	forever.
----------
This could be due to 4.2 signals.  Shutdown uses alarm signals to
break out of its attempts to write messages out to user terminals.
In 4.2 those signal routines don't do what they need to do; after
leaving the signal handler the interrupted routine is restarted,
leaving you blocked again.

The fix is to do a setjmp before the potentially blocking code and
then do a longjmp in the alarm handling routine.  I would attach diffs,
but our shutdown has been hacked for other things, too, and it would
be too much work to isolate those few lines.

scott preece
gould/csd - urbana
ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece