Bug: Unable to cleanly shutdown or reboot Zentyal

[samsmith]

When I click on the red button on the extreme lower right of the taskbar a window pops up with several options - shutdown reboot hibernate log off etc.

When I click on shutdown or reboot, it gives an error that my account (the admin account I created during the setup) does not have permission to perform the operation.

Using the terminal I tried:

sudo shutdown now

only for it to proceed to a totally black screen, then hang. Totally unresponsive.

The only way it seems to shut it down is to hold the power button on the psychical machine down for ~5 seconds.

What a disaster this Zentyal is!  This has been the most frustrating and least user friendly systems I have delt with in my entire life.

I want to snap the install cd in half over my knee and throw the machine across the room at this point.

Is this how they get you to fork over $$$ for the "commercial edition" is to make the free version unusable and chock full of bugs?

Nice job guys.

This product is an absolute disaster and I will recommend to everyone I know to never use Zentyal. It's only successful at turning your computer into a very expensive space heater and little else!

[expertgeeks]

What happens when you shutdown via the web interface ? What errors appear in syslog during shutdown ? What non-zentyal software have you installed ? This sounds like the kernel bug described here https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,27362.0.html
Did you search the forum or were you just venting ?

I understand your frustration, but if Zentyal was a bad as you suggest no-one could use it - and that's clearly not the case.

[vmb]

I guess that you are running Zentyal server with a GUI on the server. I'm over 50 and prefer to run my servers with just a text based console to eliminate the risk of a graphics card problem.

My preferred shutdown command is:
sudo halt -p

Some things for you to check that I have found in the past have helped get a machine to shutdown and power off cleanly...

Is the BIOS up to date for the motherboard, all known bugs fixed?
Is the graphics card firmware up to date?
If running server on a PC, configure BIOS to disable suspend and hibernate.
If running server on a PC, disable APM, enable ACPI.
Disable all device wake-ups in BIOS, no wake up from mouse movement etc.
If running on server hardware, does IPMI chassis power control work? Check freeipmi is installed.
Enable CPU frequency scaling if supported.

Sometimes, you just can't get a PC to either power off or warmboot properly under Linux due to ACPI problems created by a buggy, non standards compliant AML compiler used by the BIOS manufacturer. Sadly most PC BIOS power management is optimised for Windows and the Linux optimisations are deliberately broken/untested/unoptimised. I have an ancient single core AMD64 machine that will poweroff but it will only reboot if it 'thinks' it is running Windows.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DSDT
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/ACPITricksAndTips

Best of luck.