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Track and log unclean shutdowns in CentOS 7

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I needed to find a way to track if my CentOS 7 systems reboot unexpectedly. I was surprised that this isn’t something that the OS does by default. I found this article from RedHat that outlines that you basically have to write a couple of systemd scripts yourself if you want this functionality. So, I did.

I ended up with three separate systemd services that accomplish what I want:

  • set_graceful_shutdown: Runs just before shutdown. Creates a file /root/grateful_shutdown
  • log_ungraceful_shutdown: Runs on startup. Checks to see if /root/grateful_shutdown is missing and logs this fact to a file (/var/log/shutdown.log) if it is.
  • reset_shutdown_flag: Runs after log_ungraceful_shutdown. It checks for the presence of that file, and if it exists, removes it.

I placed these three files into /etc/systemd/system and then ran systemctl daemon-reload & systemctl enable for each one.

set_graceful_shutdown.service

[Unit]
Description=Set flag for graceful shutdown
DefaultDependencies=no
RefuseManualStart=true
Before=shutdown.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/touch /root/graceful_shutdown

[Install]
WantedBy=shutdown.target

log_ungraceful_shutdown.service

[Unit]
Description=Log ungraceful shutdown
ConditionPathExists=!/root/graceful_shutdown
RefuseManualStart=true
RefuseManualStop=true
Before=reset_shutdown_flag.service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=true
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "echo $$(date): Improper shutdown detected >> /var/log/shutdown.log"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

reset_shutdown_flag.service

[Unit]
Description=Check if previous system shutdown was graceful
ConditionPathExists=/root/graceful_shutdown
RefuseManualStart=true
RefuseManualStop=true

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=true
ExecStart=/bin/rm /root/graceful_shutdown

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

It feels like a kludge but it works pretty well. The result is I get an entry in a log file if the system wasn’t shut down properly.