Turn off Forum via Shell Command Line?

[BryceW]

I currently have a decently large forum with 56,000+ members and 2.1 million posts. This is on dedicated server and I back it up using mysqldump via SSH command line. I want to automate this process via a cron job.
Currently, I turn off the forums in the admin CP, do the mysqldump in shell then turn it back on.

Obviously, the mysqldump is easily scripted but I need a way to turn off the forums with a script, like a ssh command or something. Any suggestions, ideas?

If I dont turn the forums off, the update takes twice as long, the forums lag out and my members just sit there hitting refresh