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Below is a quick procedure to re-start a NeatClubs physical server.
It assumes that you have access to the server IP address, the sshadmin password, and the root password.
It is preferable to shutdown a server in this manner rather than cycling power, since a hard reset of the server can result in file system consistency problems and the need to run fsck - running fsck may require someone at the console to answer questions in the case of problems on re-start.
If the server cannot be reached by ssh (secure-shell) there are two possibilities:
| • | The server may already be down |
| • | There may be a network or DNS issue preventing access to the server |
| 2. | Using PUTTY, login to the server. You should login as user sshadmin using the sshadmin password. |
| 3. | Once you are logged in as sshadmin, become the root user using the commnd su - (su followed by a space and a minus sign). When prompted for the root password, enter it. |
| 4. | Next, cd into the directory that contains the server management scripts. (cd /var/www/vhosts/scripts) |
| 5. | Placeholder - this facility does not exist yet, but at this point we may want to place all sites in maintenance mode and give a proper warning to users active on the web-sites - we need to have a script like "close_all_sites.sh" and "open_all_sites.sh" that runs through all sites and updates the MySQL databases for each site instance accordingly so that the sites go into maintenance mode - we could allow users already logged in (in the middle of registering as an example) to continue their activity until they log out while displaying a warning at the top of the screen that the site has been placed in maintenance mode. |
| 6. | Next, type sync from the shell prompt (to force file system buffers to flush to disk) and then type init 6 to force all shutdown scripts to run, the kernel to re-start and the system to return to run-level 3. (some documentation will recommend using the Linux shutdown command, but this does the same thing and different Linux variants can have different command line switches to remember so I prefer init 6) |
| 7. | During this time the system will be unreachable because the ssh connection will close as the server restarts. The server should become network accessible again after a reboot in no more than a few minutes. |
| 8. | If the server fails to come up after a re-start it is not a good idea to power cycle the system - we should either attempt to get console access to the machine (the service provider has a shared console KVM switch and document in the Customer Hub how to access it) or we should contact iWeb support and ask them to inspect the server. |
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