Tonight I went to restart a docker (medusa) and it did not respond. It tried restarting it, nothing. The logs said 'sycning disks'. I waited for almost an hour and the logs did not change, they still said 'syncing disks' so I attempted to stop all my dockers one at a time and they all stopped except plexpy.  I then tried dismounting the array and eventually the gui timed out. Eventually I issued a reboot command from the command prompt and after about a half an hour of the server sitting there saying 'the server is going down now' and nothing happening, I powered the server off. I realize I should of waited longer but I got impatient. I have attached the diagnostics I gathered from the command prompt while it was trying to reboot and before I powered it off.

tower-diagnostics-20171122-0012.zip

On my phone so not able to look at the logs, but just thought I'd mention that a quick press of the power button will initiate a powerdown script which is pretty effective at killing processes and getting the array to shutdown cleanly. Can take a few minutes. Very occasionally I have a VM that was running in the night be stopped in the morning , and attempts to restart fail due to insufficient memory. And stopping array won't complete. It's like the VM is somehow partially still running and holding the big memory chunk. And some of the processes in the crashed VM are still holding locks on files. Rather than something like the reboot command, tapping the power button has worked very well. Can easily look like nothing is happening for an uncomfortably long time. But patience pays off. Last time it seemed to be doing nothing for between.5 and 10 minutes. I was considering giving up, and then suddenly I could see the disk activity lights on my hotswap bays flashing on and off, one at a time, (successful unmounting I assume), before the satisfying powering down of the server. Always worth a try before resorting to the long press on the power button which is more or less equivalent to cutting power, which is going to mean a dirty shutdown.

 

Quick tap of the power button is running a script that @WeeboTech initially wrote that persistently terminates stubborn processes affecting shutdown - I think it's called powerdown, and you can run it from a command line if that is an option. For me, with no console, a command line is not always an option. I always say a quiet thanks to Weebo when it saves me from a 15 hour parity check!

 

On reboot did everything come up fine and Dockers functional? If logs prove unhelpful you might run a memory test just to rule that out. But if everything is working after a reboot it might be one of those unexplainable mysteries.

Yes on reboot everything came up fine, except the server wanted to do a parity check which I canceled since it's scheduled to run one on Saturday anyway and mine take 2 days on this server.

 

Thanks for your insightful reply.