Machine fake rebooting

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2010, Tyler Aviss wrote:

> I've since changed my own password and turned on molly-guard just in
> case. Is there perhaps something that can be misinterpreted as a
> reboot or some weird hot-key that will do it?

In general it's considered a bad idea to auto-reboot servers since they 
may fail to come up and no sysadmin is necessarily present to deal with 
the issue.

There are a couple of processes which can be allowed to reboot a box 
though:

(1) UPS daemon software.  Normally they halt rather than reboot and they 
clearly report themselves when doing it.

(2) A watchdog process.  A watchdog should really be pushing the big red 
button rather than doing an orderly shutdown[1].   Software watchdogs can 
fail to reboot a box in some circumstances but even they can call 
HARD_RESET_NOW() and avoid doing an orderly shutdown.

Do run rkhunder and/or chkrootkit on the box, just in case.

[1] If the box is able to do an orderly shutdown how sick could it be? If 
the orderly shutdown fails the watchdog was useless.

Rob

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