Debian bug report logs - #1420
reboot too eager to reboot

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From sfere.elmail.co.uk!richard Thu Sep 21 10:47:38 1995
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Date: Wed, 20 Sep 95 20:38:42 +0100 (BST)
From: Richard Kettlewell <richard@elmail.co.uk>
To: debian-bugs@pixar.com
Subject: reboot too eager to reboot

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.56-5

Rebooting my work machine after three weeks uptime I did what I almost
invariably do at home and typed `reboot'.  At home this calls
shutdown, and tidies everything up nicely.  (I have the same version
of sysvinit both at home and at work.)

At work, however, the effect was to briefly print a message saying
something to the effect of ``cannot determine runlevel, doing a hard
reboot''.  It then rebooted immediately, in particular without
umounting anything.

The reboot man page notes that shutdown will be called if the system
is not in runlevel 0 or 6; I don't know what condition it is that
causes reboot to be unable to determine the runlevel but it seems to
be to be highly unreasonable to just assume that it's OK to reboot if
it can't work out whether or not it is.

More sensible semantics in this situation would be to only carry out
the reboot if the -f flag is present.

-- 
Richard Kettlewell                 <URL:http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/>
Work+home: <richard@elmail.co.uk>       Home only: <richard@sfere.elmail.co.uk>