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Comment on Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outageparent

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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

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