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    Disable power down (halt) on SG- series?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Official Netgate® Hardware
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    • luckman212L
      luckman212 LAYER 8
      last edited by

      Had one of our guys accidentally (don't ask) halt a remote system and power it completely down. It was a bit of a headache since this happened off hours and thus the network was down until someone could get in there the next day and physically unplug/replug the power cable to get it booted again.

      Which raises my question: is there any way to "soft-disable" the ACPI halt to make it just perform a reset/reboot instead? I remember way back when I was building PCs this was something that many BIOS'es supported – basically an "always-on" mode where even if you shut down the box, it would just power back up.

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      • jimpJ
        jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
        last edited by

        That isn't completely viable because there are plenty valid scenarios when you would want to power them off. Primarily when UPS on battery triggered a shutdown. Also for  powering off to move/relocate, etc, if it rebooted instead of powered off, unless you were quick enough to the power cord it would defeat the purpose of halting in the first place. In other words, you'd make the lives of many more people difficult in order to stop some foot-shooting/accidents.

        In cases like where you have those sorts of remote systems, having an IP PDU with OOB access (e.g. separate firewall/modem/etc) is best.

        If you want to change the default behavior on your own systems, it would only take a simple one-line patch to /etc/rc.halt to change "shutdown -p now" to "shutdown -r now" and then it would only reboot, never halt.

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        • luckman212L
          luckman212 LAYER 8
          last edited by

          Thanks Jim
          Good tips. Remote PDU is a great idea actually.

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          • C
            C0RR0SIVE
            last edited by

            Why not just provide a user account that doesn't have the option to shut a system down?

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            • luckman212L
              luckman212 LAYER 8
              last edited by

              That's another possibility, thanks.

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