[plug] How to force a shutdown with reboot??

[Onno Benschop]

On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 15:53, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <00a401c3ce8f$97579350$0401050a at cel2000>
> on Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 12:44:20PM +0800, Paul Arch wrote:
> > On a side note, I don't know how many times I have typed reboot to take a
> > server down, and waiting for that associated beep to indicate
> > shutdown/reboot, but not hearing it.  Until realising I just rebooted
> > another server I was connected to via ssh  ! Man that can be a sinking
> > feeling
> 
> Oh yeah, like when you're connected to multiple machines and you run
> `rm -rf /` on the client's...er...nevermind.
> 
> PS. Not a true story :)

I know a true story like that - I know it's true because I was a user of
the machine on which it happened, and I know who did it because he was
one of my colleagues at the time.

He was logged into cujo.curtin.edu.au, (CUrtin Janitors Office if you're
wondering) a machine that pre-dated info.curtin as the central mail and
news server. Todd was working on something (what it was he was doing is
lost in the mists of time) when he issued the command.

cujo was a Sparc and was running some version of Solaris. He couldn't
terminate the command for some reason, but as it was, cujo just kept
running (with not a lot on its disks). The mistake Todd made came later,
when he rebooted cujo. The machine would no longer boot and it couldn't
boot from CD or floppy, because there were no longer any drivers on
disk.

I think he had to remove the drive, power down another host, copy stuff
to the drive, stick it back into cujo and try again, but I'm not sure if
that was how he got the system back. I do recall some serious ribbing,
and we still (none of us work at Curtin anymore) nudge each other and
say: "Do you remember the time when Todd..." It always makes us smile.

Todd went off to the states to make it big in portable computing - wrote
lots of applications for the Newton - dunno what he's up to these days.


Onno Benschop 

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