>In the Installation Guide for the 5.3 AIX Server, the following >snippet appears: > >"If you started the server as a background process, connect to the >server as an administrative client and issue the HALT command. If >you cannot connect to the server with an administrative client, >you must use the kill -9 command with the process ID number (pid) >that is displayed at initialization." > ... > >What is the reason the Installation Guide tells us to do "kill -9"?
The TSM 5.3 manuals are not online, so we don't have the big picture; but, doing a 'kill -9' (SIGKILL) on any process is the most extreme action to be taken on a process, and should not be a general step recommended by a vendor manual. SIGKILL is a signal which cannot be intercepted and handled by an application, and gives the TSM server no chance to cleanly terminate things or generate diagnostic data. It is sad to see the manual being so simplistic, given the availability of thorough information in IBM site Technotes 1154958 and 1154959 - whose recommended signalling should have been carried over into the manual. Another thing to note: IBM lacks standardization for the signalling of server processes, so the signals which the TSM server is known to specially process cannot be expected to be handled the same way by any other IBM server process (e.g, Infoprint Manager). Richard Sims http://people.bu.edu/rbs
