booting a new kernel remotely

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

  (Note the cross-posting and Followup-To.  Installing new kernels and
rebooting the system is, in my opinion, a system administration issue.)

In article <1990Sep29.162137.23912 at mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
|>  You can use 'wall' to scare the users of before you rename the kernel images.
|> At the same time create /etc/.nologin to prevent new logins.
|> Next you can umount all of the disk partitions, so that on reboot only
|> the root partition should be checked.  Finally do the rename and reboot.

  First of all, it's /etc/nologin on most systems, not /etc/.nologin.

  Second, you can do "shutdown -k +5 Installing a new kernel" (at least you
can do this with the 4.3BSD shutdown; I don't know about more SYSV-like
systems) and shutdown will automatically send out the wall messages and create
/etc/nologin with the appropriate comments in it.  When the five minutes
expired, it will simply go away, rather than actually rebooting (That's the -k
option.  From the man page: "If it isn't obvious, -k is to make people think
the system is going down!").

-- 
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