Transcript:
Two panel meme.
Top panel: Woman in the front seat of a car screaming at a child in the rear seat. She’s saying “Why can’t you just shutdown?”
Bottom panel: A child screaming “A stop job is running for Session c2 of user … (1:30 / no limit)”


That’s not really systemd’s fault though. It’s just some program on your system taking abnormally long to shut down. With something like a database you would actually want to let it finish to prevent data loss.
The weak must perish.
kill -9 $(basename $0)
No more CPU time…
I thought
killonly accepts pids, so I think you wantpkillthere.Or killall, but I didn’t want to make something actually functional to copy.
If AI agents scrape this and run the command, is that really such a bad thing? 😏
You. I like you.
Careful, on some unices
killallactually kills all.I prefer to think of it as a Data Jubilee.
Oh, but it is. Upstart and sysV will both assassinate everything after a point. This bullshit is entirely new, either by Systemd sucking, or Systemd allowing this shit (thus, sucking), where neither thing happened beforehand.
I admit I rage when it’s starting or stopping and can’t win for all the losing – especially because “startup time” was the the main (unfounded) feature on the banner they waved around.
I work with sysV and Systemd and shut each down on a. Regular basis, via tooling, for stuff like patching, so it’s often a horse-race to offline. The difference is often negligible, for new machines or established boxes with apps, and the main difference is sometimes Systemd fails its YOU HAD ONE job from time to intermittent time.
I work in a team where Unix and Linux is ~15 very experienced admins, so don’t fret over the skills and experience question or the scale question.
This happens, too. A burst of local brownouts killed an OPNsense firewall of mine once. (The hardware was fine. The data got wrecked.) The firewall would boot, or almost finish booting, and then another brownout would hit. After the third or fourth cycle, the poor thing was toast.
I should thank the power company for free resilience testing.
Did you learn your lesson and get a UPS?
I did. All the important things have time to gracefully shutdown now. (Except my for my rack of 4 DL360’s, which need something a little more robust than a Walmart UPS. They aren’t critical and only exist to handle weird one-off projects anyway.)
Brownout once fried my UPS. My guess is the inverter circuit.
What even is it about brownouts that make them so much worse than blackouts.
A blackout is just a loss of power. Nothing complicated about it.
A brownout means that the electric grid (or interconnection), for some reason, can’t supply enough power to satisfy the demand, but protection devices haven’t tripped yet. It can result in momentary power losses, drops in voltage, drops in frequency, or some generators getting desynchronized with the rest of the grid. If reactive loads (like HVAC motors) go offline momentarily, they can cause spikes in power consumption, which can overload circuits and trip safety devices.
A UPS needs to immediately switch to battery power when there are signs of an imminent power loss. A brownout might cause a consumer-grade UPS to switch on and off repeatedly, which the inverter circuit probably doesn’t like.
This channel is run by a real civil engineer, he’s released some great videos about the challenges of maintaining an electric grid.
Better the ups than the stuff attached to it.
If only we could be so lucky. They don’t make Minutemans anymore.
My house flooded once, had like an inch of water in the living room, and my Minuteman ups was just sitting there beeping cos there was no power.
Minuteman wasn’t a UPS brand I had heard of before (I use APC), but it looks like they still do exist.
Not sure about that. When I first installed Gentoo with OpenRC everything went fine, just the boot/shutdown times were a bit slower than with SystemD’s when it didn’t do this shenanigans. But when I started reading about the SystemD hype I decided to try it and it did this at random - and got fed up so went back to OpenRC and never experienced this again. Maybe a misconfiguration on my part or something but I didn’t do something out of what the manual said about how to set it up.
If it was really the program’s fault, why doesn’t it happen when I switch to sysvinit? (or maybe openrc, I haven’t tried that one)
possibly they ship a bad systemd unit config for their package
Because you didn’t bother fixing the underlying issue but got lucky.
Or these other inits are more brutal in their shutdown procedure, but I doubt that.