Since I installed OpenSolaris on the HP Proliant DL180 G5, I’m constantly having problems with init 5 not being able to switch power off on shut down. Today, while searching a bit to see if anyone else had this problem, I came up with the following thread: Shutting down PC. The comment by perksta is the most useful one:

Hi there,
I too was having this issue, hanging on shutdown. My setup is a ASUS P5E3-WS-Pro with QUAD core Q6600 2.4Ghz with AOC-SAT2-MV8. I found this blog :-

http://masafumi-ohta.blogspot.com/2008/10/workaroundeee-901-has-shutdown-problem_08.html

about an ASUS eee 901 which was worked around by offlining the extra cores before shutdown.

add “/usr/sbin/psradm -f 1 2 3” before “init 5” line in the file “/usr/lib/hal/sunos/hal-system-power-shutdown-sunos”

This has worked for me consistently now (about 20 shutdowns) I am using Solaris Express CE build 103.

I still get lots of ‘svc-syseventd stop’ errors during shutdown but at least it turns off reliably

To keep it short, running:

pfexec /usr/sbin/psradm -f 1 2 3
pfexec /sbin/init 5

Seems to do the trick, although I confess I’ve only used it a couple of times. Time will tell if this workaround works reliably or not.