Comments on: Killing a Solaris 10 Zone stuck in the shutting_down state.

By: Alasdair

Alasdair — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:31:38 +0000

W Sanders,

Is that on the official Solaris 10/11?

As I mentioned above, it’s fully fixed in SmartOS, thankfully. We switched to SmartOS and haven’t looked back – recently migrated over 250 Solaris 10 Zones to SmartOS and are very happy with the results :-)

If you’re in a corporate environment, SmartDatacenter may be worth looking at, which is Joyent’s commercial product based on SmartOS.

By: Alasdair

Alasdair — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:25:29 +0000

Nakarti,

Did it work? It might not, “sync” processes usually indicate stuck IO, which is a more serious condition. Which Solaris version was this on?

I can report that we haven’t had any stuck zones since moving to SmartOS, as Joyent have hunted down and fixed all the bugs thanks to their massive cloud scale.

By: Nakarti

Nakarti — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:15:37 +0000

I did this on a global thats scheduled for reboot. The zones are stuck with a sync process that I can’t kill. Good thing a reboot was planned!

By: W Sanders

W Sanders — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:32:22 +0000

Still not fixed as of 2013

By: sharath

sharath — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:18:27 +0000

The umount command worked. Awesome!!!

By: rajeesh

rajeesh — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:32:11 +0000

OMG!!! this works…thanks a ton .. i was about to reboot the server for this bloody prob!!! thanks mate thanks a ton .

By: Bruce K

Bruce K — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:25:14 +0000

in many cases, when a zone is stuck in “down” state when shuting down, it is because you have a session in the global zone in which you are in a path of the zone you are shutting down. e.g. /zones//root/…..
e.g.in this example zone “laker” is stuck in the “down” state. so check all your windows or try fuser to see who was in any of lakers filesystems via the global zone and kill the process or cd out of it.
caramel# zoneadm list -cv
ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP
0 global running / native shared
5 bobcat running /zones/bobcat native shared
6 laker down /zones/laker native shared

check all your opened windows in global zone and you will find one that is no longer in a valid path. just cd + enter or cd / and zone that was stuck in the “down” state will come all the way down.

By: Alasdair

Alasdair — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:37:01 +0000

Hi Brian,

There are existing bugs in the Solaris codebase related to shutting down zones. If you’re not wedded to Oracle, I’d recommend checking out SmartOS. They have fixed most (all?) of them and we haven’t had any issues shutting down Zones since moving to it.

Good luck with Oracle support!

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:09:02 +0000

2012 – and same issue, with little on Oracle’s web-site for proper procedures to clean-up mount & zone

Created a case with Oracle for the fun of it.

tried everything with exception to the pkill

waiting for Oracle

Thanks for the info

-Brian