Asking all remaining processes to terminate... fail

Question

Ubuntu 12.10 64 bits with Unity.
When I restart or shutdown the PC, it takes too long to do it.
It shows the line Asking all remaining processes to terminate... [fail] and after Killing all remaining processes.
How can I debug this to determine the origin of the problem?

Answer 1

I had the same problem with Ubuntu 13.04 running virtual in VMware player. I tried Ctrl + Alt + T (I didn't expect a console and it doesn't show any), and all the sudden the installation continues!

I already tried Esc, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + break, but this had no effect.

Answer 2

I was experiencing the same behaviour when using a NAS (samba share) with fixed mounting points. It was caused by some kind of race condition between the unmounting process and network-manager during termination stage on shutdown. Here's a small workaround that fixed it for me:

Fire up a terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T and paste these commands:

sudo mv /etc/rc0.d/S31umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh

sudo mv /etc/rc6.d/S31umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh

This simply moves the unmounting process up the priority list when shutting down or rebooting the system. At least my system is shutting down very fast again without errors.

Good luck!