Makes me realize how much I take quality of life features in modern servers for granted. We don't need to be physically present to reboot servers, eliminating the possibility (well, mostly) we will power down the wrong one like this - even if the OS is completely unresponsive there's lights out management that can be used to remotely manage power to the system. For the times that one needs to do physical maintenance on a server a blinking light can be toggled through the LOM interface to identify the machine, you can have the hostname display on a little LCD on the front panel too.
It's really amazing to see how far computing has come in just the past two decades.
I've done it myself, I generally avoid it by using `shutdown -r` instead which will by default delay reboot for 1 minute (at least it does on CentOS/RHEL 7). It's annoying to wait the extra time, but having a period to backout with a `shutdown -c` in case I made a mistake has saved me more than it hasn't.
On the flip side, at least when you make this mistake with a VM you're typically not down for long assuming you have fast-ish storage - on average any of the VM's I'm responsible for are back up in 60-90 seconds, physical machines can take 5 minutes or more (memory testing, expansion ROM's, etc. all make post take FOREVER even on modern hardware).
If it helps, molly-guard [0] aims to prevent this kind of "oops". Back in the days of running co-located kit, we had that on the host boxes for the "oops, that was the host rather than a VM that I just stopped" moments.
Comments
Makes me realize how much I take quality of life features in modern servers for granted. We don't need to be physically present to reboot servers, eliminating the possibility (well, mostly) we will power down the wrong one like this - even if the OS is completely unresponsive there's lights out management that can be used to remotely manage power to the system. For the times that one needs to do physical maintenance on a server a blinking light can be toggled through the LOM interface to identify the machine, you can have the hostname display on a little LCD on the front panel too.
It's really amazing to see how far computing has come in just the past two decades.
I type "reboot" into the wrong SSH window all time, especially when I'm tired.
It's really quite a lot easier than pressing the wrong power button (I do that too at my desk).
I've done it myself, I generally avoid it by using `shutdown -r` instead which will by default delay reboot for 1 minute (at least it does on CentOS/RHEL 7). It's annoying to wait the extra time, but having a period to backout with a `shutdown -c` in case I made a mistake has saved me more than it hasn't.
On the flip side, at least when you make this mistake with a VM you're typically not down for long assuming you have fast-ish storage - on average any of the VM's I'm responsible for are back up in 60-90 seconds, physical machines can take 5 minutes or more (memory testing, expansion ROM's, etc. all make post take FOREVER even on modern hardware).
If it helps, molly-guard [0] aims to prevent this kind of "oops". Back in the days of running co-located kit, we had that on the host boxes for the "oops, that was the host rather than a VM that I just stopped" moments.
[0] https://packages.debian.org/sid/molly-guard