shutdown procedure

Turn off the power. A clean power drop won't hurt them at all; brown- outs and surges are the danger, though to the hardware, and not the IOS (which runs from flash).

Of course it never hurts to do a "write" before turning off the power. You never know if something was changed and not written.

When you want to bring it back to the same state it had before the powerdown, you also might want to check if it has one or more debugs turned on. They are not saved.

Good point.

It's basically the same as a computer but you need to take into acount the different non-volatile storage and there is no software "suhutdown" command.

Following is for IOS, no experience of Modular IOS.

# Make sure that you have an off-line backup copy of the OS and any boot-helper available in case of catastrophe.

# Make sure that you have an off-line backup copy of the config available in case of catastrophe.

# Make sure that config changes have been saved unless you know you don't want that. - copy runn start - you can always first make a backup copy of the current startup config in case you might need it.

# Make sure that the device is not writing to the long term storage (non-volatile storage). - wait until all copy commands that are writing to such storage have completed

# If it is a critical box and you are paranoid and have never known it to be rebooted you might care to check. - config register is reasonable - any boot variables are reasonable and relevant files exist and are not corrupt. - any boot statements are reasonable and relevant files exist and are not corrupt.

# Turn off minimising risks of surge. - turn off one PSU and wait a few seconds (10?) before - turning off the other

# Turn on minimising surges too.

If that seems like a lot of bother, think how much bother it will be if it takes hours or days to get it going again. I was once flown 500 miles and back to sort out stuff after a failure to have saved the current config. (not by me I hasten to add:) I expect the IT manager of the company involved was somewhat stressed as the weekend (and possibly his job) ticked away.