Closing connection after executing reboot using ssh command

Question

I am using the reboot -f command remotely to force reboot a Unix machine. The problem is that the ssh connection remains active for a long time which I don't know why? I want to close the ssh connection immediately after rebooting the machine and return to my local shell. How can i do that? Note that the reboot command without -f flag does not work.

Answer 1

The command reboot -f never returns (unless you didn't have permission to cause a reboot). At the point where it is issued, the SSH client is waiting for something to do, which could be:

• the SSH server notifying the client that something happened that requires its attention, for example that there is some output to display, or that the remote command has finished;
• some event on the client side, such as a signal to relay;
• a timer firing up to cause the client to send a keepalive message (and close the connection if the server doesn't reply).

Since the SSH server process is dead, the SSH client won't die until the timer fires up.

If you run ssh remotehost 'reboot -f >/dev/null &', then what happens is:

1. The remote shell launches the reboot command in the background.
2. Because the server-side shell command has exited and there is no process holding the file descriptor for standard output open, the SSH server closes the connection.
3. The reboot command causes the machine to reboot.

However, this is not reliable: depending on timing, step 3 might happen before step 2. Adding a timer makes this unlikely:

ssh remotehost '{ sleep 1; reboot -f; } >/dev/null &'

To be absolutely sure that the server side is committed to running reboot, while making sure that it doesn't actually reboot before notifying the client that it is committed, you need an additional notification to go from the server to the client. This can be output through the SSH connection, but it gets complicated.

Answer 2

I found this solution to perform the best for me.

Use -o "ServerAliveInterval 2" with your ssh command, like so:

$ ssh -o "ServerAliveInterval 2" root@remotehost reboot

The said option makes the client side poke the server over a secure channel every 2 seconds. Eventually as the rebooting proceeds, it will stop to respond and the client will tear the connection down.

Answer 3

Some answers were close, but the right answer is:

ssh [email protected] "nohup sudo reboot &>/dev/null & exit"

explanation:

• you want to exit as the last command so the status of the last command is 0 (success). You can prepend a sleep if you wish, but it is not necessary
• you need to run reboot in the background, because otherwise the server will close the connection and you will get an error. It will still reboot on most systems but if you are scripting the return status will be error (not 0) even with the command executing properly
• running on the background is not enough, as the stdin and stdout are still attached to the virtual terminal through SSH, so the connection will not be closed. You need to do two extra things for the SSH session to end and leave the command running on the background.
  • 1) you need to redirect stdout and stderr to /dev/null so they are not redirected by the virtual terminal that holds the SSH session. This is the &>/dev/null part.
  • 2) you need to redirect stdin to an unreadable file in the same fashion. That is what the shell builtin nohup does.

With only a command running on the background dettached from the terminal in every way, exit will close the session and because there are no stdin or stdout left on the virtual terminal SSH will terminate the connection without errors.

Answer 4

I use the following command:

ssh -t <hostname> 'sudo shutdown --reboot 0 && exit'

Here is what this is doing:

• It instructs the machine to reboot in the next moment, but not during this command
• Exits cleanly from SSH
• Maintains the SSH TTY the entire time so sudo is happy and can execute properly.

Answer 5

Have you tried the following

# shutdown -r now

I find that on some systems I worked on in the pass, the reboot command had some problems. Then again I can't find anything in the manpage of shutdown that would do the same as reboot with the -f flag.

Answer 6

I found a solution for this which might be helpful for others as well. I used the following command to close the connection right after starting the command attached to ssh:

ssh host "command to run on the host machine > /dev/null &"

I don’t exactly understand the reason why this command forces the connection to close but at least it was helpful for me. If anyone understands why it kills the ssh connection; please explain.

Answer 7

This requires a 1 minute delay but has worked reliably for me and solves the problem of the SSH client hang:

    $ sudo shutdown +1; logout

This schedules the system shutdown for 1 minute later which allows time for the logout, and hence SSH termination, to complete. If you want to wait as little time as possible, you could replace the +1 with HH:MM for a rapidly approaching time of day but that may be tricky to time correctly and may have up to a 59 second delay.

Answer 8

A simple way that I have found, is to command the shutdown/reboot as a background task (using '&'), protecting it from being closed when the session closes with 'nohup' , together with immediate shell/session exit:

nohup shutdown -r now & exit

In this way, the SSH client does not hang, since the session exits immediately, while the remote system proceeds with its reboot asynchronously.

Answer 9

How about exit from ssh session and reboot system using next command:

ssh login@host "reboot -f"

After this just press Ctrl+C for terminate ssh.

Answer 10

Try this command:

$ reboot -f && exit