You have really opened my eyes broli.

I was hoping that the scripts in the /etc/rc*.d files would bring down services,applications, etc...

I am so screwed because I have no clue what is happening on most of the servers. You see I am a dba and was tasked with this "side" project because I new unix shell scripting. I was given a server list and told to create an emergency shutdown script that will bring the servers down quickly, but not painfully like a recent power failure did. I still do not know why this was not assigned to syseng. (We are way under-staffed in syseng).