Instead of shutting down a local server I did not realise i was currently on the remote live server and HALTED it down!
Yeah! how dumb is that!!.

I would like to know how I can prevent such accidental shutdowns. I know I need to be careful, but sometimes, when you are working 16 hours at a stretch it kindof leaves your senses numb and one invariably ends up making mistakes.

Please tell me there is a solution beyond the "you got to be careful" .. please please.

thanks!
tc

i guess the immediate answer might be to rename halt... but that would presumably break other dependent scripts.

I've not tried it but i'd suggest setting a login level alias, which i *think* will take precendence over files.
i can't see why that would affect anythign outside of your login shell, so anything calling halt as root would get the real deal /bin/halt. but when logged in as root (i'm assuming that alias is done in /root/.bashrc btw.) then running "halt" without thinking will give a pleasantly goading message, rather than taking the server down, requiring /bin/halt to be required explictly to kill the box.

now comes the part where someone says that's drivel.....

but then again, it's down to being careful... but in an official way, i.e you shouldn't BE root in the first place, you should be sudoing etc... and not have access to halt as your sudoer, but only as real root. so while your sudo user can "rm -rf /home" they can't shut the machine down by mistake.

Hi.

You could remove execute permissions for halt, shutdown, poweroff etc.

If you want to shut down, just reinstate execute permissions.

Dave

thanks. The problem is that i have not been sudoing. but then is there a difference betwen su and su -

though i must also point out that when on my local machine (redhat 9.0 ) i was logged on as normal user and to test out i typed halt, i still got the system to halt. so its not like ROOT is the only one who can halt. how does it work now??

The difference between su and su - is that su - acts as a login shell for root, while su just changes your userid to 0.

What I was suggesting was to remove execute permissions from halt, shutdown etc by doing chmod -x, that way no-one can issue any of those commands without reinstating execute permissions.

Dave