On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 03:00:10PM +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > That leaves "avoid shutdown by accidentally brushing against the > button", but that isn't an issue in practice.
A lot of people are using PCs as servers instead of real servers (with two power supplies and all the bell and whistles). I have seen several "server room" rooms were servers were 5 to 10 PCs installed on a desk, with a screen, a keyboard and a mouse connected to all those machines with a KVM. They had to put pieces of paper in front of the power buttons because when you move a machine sometimes your finger presses the power button. Or you are trying to reach the back of the machine while hovering over it and something touches that button. And when it turns off and all your users are connected to the machine using NFS where their files are and you have close to 100 people currently working, you are in trouble. The knob is useful. It should be there, and allow machines to be turned off if the button is pressed. And let people turn that function of when they're using a laptop or PC as server (temporarily or not..) so they avoid accidents and mistakes that end up in a undesidered poweroff. It happened to me. In the middle of the day. With a LOT of people connected. It was not fun. We have such a room with PCs side by side acting as servers for various services, and by moving them closer to I could install another PC, I did press a power button on a machine. Spent the rest of the day going to person to person to tell them to reboot their boxes to get access to their files back. Later added thick pieces of paper in front of every power button with messages like "DO NOT TOUCH" to each one of those PCs acting as a server. In a lot of universites and places without a lot of cash to have nice rackable servers, a lot of PCs are just standing close to another and acting as servers. You do want a knob to turn off the poweroff if pressed to be present. -- Emacs suck my *vi*
