OT: Things have changed.....MS unbelievable oversight....

[Brian K. White]

On 4/13/2010 11:59 PM, Boaz Bezborodko wrote:
>>
>> essage: 7
>> Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:27:11 -0700
>> From: Bill Campbell<bill at celestial.com>
>> Subject: Re: OT: Things have changed.....MS unbelievable oversight....
>> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
>> Message-ID:<20100414022711.GA7974 at ayn.mi.celestial.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>> Perhaps shutdowns should only be done from the command line, not
>> using a GUI?  Even then, that's not foolproof as I heard loud
>> screams from my wife's office when I rebooted the Xenix machine
>> as she was typing on a terminal.
> Netware had a nice routine when shutting down...If any files were open
> on the file server it would say that files were open and ask if you
> wanted to continue shutting down.  I think it even listed the open files
> before asking.

So many sensible little things get lost along the way.

Today I got reminded of something I already knew but didn't remember 
when it mattered.
On openSUSE, somewhere along the way someone thought it made sense to 
include /etc/nologin in the list of files that get cleaned up at every 
boot. The rm command is in two different system init scripts and no way 
to avoid the action other than hacking the scripts, and since they are 
system scripts not intended to be user configurable, they can and will 
get un-hacked at any time.

This means it's not possible to lock out users, perform a reboot, 
perform some work in safe isolation after the boot, and then let the 
users in when you are done.

With a bunch of remote users from different companies, many of them 
working from home & other random places it's impossible to actually call 
them all up and make sure they will stay out voluntarily until you call 
them all back. And in our case, when a box has some reason to go down in 
the daytime, if I haven't edited those rc scripts, there are always 2 to 
20 people already logged in before _I_ can get logged in after a reboot, 
and _I'm_ sitting at a serial console watching it come up, not waiting 
and guessing blindly when network services will come back up.
I swear they must be sitting there with pre-saved passwords in their 
facetwin icons just hammering those icons continuously the whole time.

-- 
bkw