>In the Installation Guide for the 5.3 AIX Server, the following
>snippet appears:
>
>"If you started the server as a background process, connect to the
>server as an administrative client and issue the HALT command. If
>you cannot connect to the server with an administrative client,
>you must use the kill -9 command with the process ID number (pid)
>that is displayed at initialization."
>
...
>
>What is the reason the Installation Guide tells us to do "kill -9"?

The TSM 5.3 manuals are not online, so we don't have the big picture;
but, doing a 'kill -9' (SIGKILL) on any process is the most extreme
action to be taken on a process, and should not be a general step
recommended by a vendor manual.  SIGKILL is a signal which cannot be
intercepted and handled by an application, and gives the TSM server
no chance to cleanly terminate things or generate diagnostic data.

It is sad to see the manual being so simplistic, given the
availability of thorough information in IBM site Technotes
1154958 and 1154959 - whose recommended signalling should have
been carried over into the manual.

Another thing to note: IBM lacks standardization for the signalling
of server processes, so the signals which the TSM server is known
to specially process cannot be expected to be handled the same way
by any other IBM server process (e.g, Infoprint Manager).

   Richard Sims    http://people.bu.edu/rbs