Re: Yeah
"changing the Ctrl+Alt+Del behavior on my Linux servers was a good idea"
One site I supported (a school) had a few teachers who'd got it into their heads that the solution to anything running slowly was to "reboot the server" - the problem being that they'd take it down in ways that made fsck/requotaing at startup mandatory (the days of ext2fs) and a couple of thousand pupil directories to check made things slow for at least a day, so they'd get into a nasty positive feedback loop. (The ACTUAL cause of most things going slow was 50-odd windows classroom computers all attempting to fire up the same software at once, on a 10Mb/s hubbed network on the student side. Collisions galore.)
I eventually solved the issue by setting ctrl-alt-del to the message "I'm sorry Dave, I can't allow you to do that. Now go and sit in the corner.", disconnecting the reset and power switches from the front panel (the days of AT power supplies) and fitting padlocks to the server cabinet as well as educating office staff that anyone attempting to enter the server cupboard should be challenged no matter what seniority they might have (the worst offenders were the IT staff, of course - guess who specified the network despite warnings it wouldn't be adequate?)
There was some griping in the first couple of days but once they let the thing actually run continuously for more than 72 hours at a time it started performing fairly well (as well as 8MB ram would let it - this was a very long time ago)
The slowness was eventually fixed by fitting 100MB/s switches and the machine eventually enjoyed uptimes hitting 2 years at one point before being replaced and the filesystems upgraded.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
