Every now and then, one comes across a true relic. One such relic is Novell Netware. As I never used Netware before, I quickly resorted to Google in order to figure out how to do certain things, and thought it would be nice to bundle them here.

One such thing is performing a graceful shutdown of a Netware server. Unlike other systems, where a single command is enough, Netware proves to be more of a challenge and has certain caveats when attempting to perform a shutdown. And this depends greatly on the version of Netware.

If you are running Groupwise on a Netware server...

In the GWOA, press F7, then choose to shut down Groupwise. This will bring you back to the system console.

Groupwise 4.11 and before

The only proper way is to run a file called SHUTDOWN.NCF. This will perform the necessary tasks in order to gracefully shut down the server. The file includes the actual DOWN command at the end.

Do NOT run DOWN directly, as this will skip over the graceful shutdown of services (including proper unmount of volumes) and this may break your server!

Groupwise 5.1 and up

Starting from Groupwise 5.1, the DOWN implicitly runs the SHUTDOWN.NCF file before performing the actual shutdown of the server, preventing an unclean shutdown.

Warning!

Don't use SHUTDOWN (without the NCF extension) as this will really "shut down" (i.e. almost like a power-off) the server, which may cause all sorts of trouble.

Alternate ways of shutting down Netware

If running SHUTDOWN.NCF or DOWN does not work, there are some alternate ways of shutting down the server.

One way of performing a graceful shutdown is by pressing the keyboard combination CTRL + ALT + ESC. This will provide you with the option to shut down the server the proper way.

If the server really acts up, there's one other option, but only use this as a prior to last resort. Pressing the keyboard combination LAlt + LShift + RShift + Esc will bring up the debugger. Inside the debugger you can then press Q (for quit), which will shut down the server. Note that this method does not perform a graceful shutdown, so only use this when no other options are left (short of pulling the plug).