reboot on wheel

[Kevin Oberman]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 7:24 PM, Bruno Lauzé <brunolauze at msn.com> wrote:

> Is there a reason for this:
>
> @wheeluser: rebootOperation not permitted at wheeluser: shutdown -r
> nowSystem halt
> What's the difference?
>

shutdown(8) does a clean shutdown; i.e. it runs all rc.d stop routines.
Cleanly stopping some things can be critical things like database shutdown
(and many other things).

reboot(8) and halt(8) don't run these. They are intended as emergency tools
and require root. membership inoperator is all that is required for
shutdown. (Didn't realize wheel would do the trick. Or maybe your wheeladm
is in the operator group, too.)

It frequently surprises me how common it is for even long time FreeBSD
users seem to be unaware of this and the danger of reboot/halt(8) for some
systems. Of course, for many systems it will make no real difference.
--
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com