Welcome back to this blog series on Linux. My name is John DeVito, and I'm a Senior Customer Success Architect here at 1E. In this blog we'll talk about some of the many 1E platform Instructions for Linux which can be found on the 1E Exchange.

Among the instructions in the Linux System Management product pack on the 1E Exchange, you will find two that'll help you to identify Linux systems that have encountered improper shutdowns. One shows the number of improper shutdowns over the last X number of system boots. The other shows the number of improper shutdowns over the last X number of days.

For example, to identify which systems have encountered an improper shutdown within the last 10 times the devices have been booted, run the 1E-Exchange-ShutdownCheck instruction in the Linux System Management product pack.

In the 1E platform, start typing "Find Possible Linux Powerdown Failures in past X Boots" to locate the instruction and enter 20 in the parameter field, as shown.

The output of the question will contain information that indicates what the status of each device is regarding the question about possible powerdown failures within the past 20 boot cycles. Including:

  • JOURNALING IS NOT ENABLED ON THIS DEVICE
    • Indicates that the Linux system isn't configured to retain any journal information beyond the currently active boot session.
    • You may use the following instructions to enable journaling or make configuration changes to it, if it is enabled
      • Create Missing Linux Journal Directory
      • List all Linux JournalD Settings
      • Change Linux JournalD Setting
  • NO IMPROPER SHUTDOWNS DETECTED
  • Date and Time of improper shutdown with information on the journal entry that contains further information

The last 20 boots in the environment examined by the 1E platform instruction above yielded the following information:

The last number of boots could be used to identify instances where a system is crashing regularly. But it's also possible to check for improper shutdowns over several days using the "Find Possible Linux Powerdown Failures in Past X Days" instruction and entering the desired number of days. The question shown below is checking for improper shutdowns over the past 90 days.

The output for this instruction is consistent with the output of the previous instruction shown. But in using this query it's seen that there have been improper shutdowns that have occurred within the past 90 days:

Knowing the history of the environment under examination, the improper shutdowns shown were the result of purposeful removal of power from the machines in question. Note that the devices that aren't reporting an improper shutdown show a message indicating that no improper shutdown was detected. They have empty values in the Journal Number and Journal Access columns. If an improper shutdown is detected those columns contain the dates covered by the journal containing the improper shutdown information as well as the command line used to examine that journal in detail.

Thanks for your time today, and I hope that these instructions are of use to you in examining your Linux environments.

If you're interested in learning more about Linux repositories and updates, check out part one of this series!