How do you undo THIS???

Pengu

Pengu

Digital Music Pimp
This is purely a hypothetical question.

You'll see below that I have my old G4 as a local server.. I had reason to reboot it a little while ago, and happened to notice this message came up in Server Admin when i said reboot server.

I highlighted the word that makes it seem the most questionable for those that don't catch on..
 

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Doc Brown and a DeLorean, maybe. Any other episode of any post-classic Star Trek series.
I guess it could say ... Do you really want to reboot? Really? Are you sure? No doubt?
 
no... i think you all mis understood.
Are you sure you want to reboot this server now?
This operation IS undoable....
Click to expand...

Maybe i should ask in plain english. Maybe you didn't look at the image.

HOW THE HELL DO YOU UNDO A REBOOT?
 
maybe this is an undocumented feature.

What, you didn't want to do that, and undo just won't cut it?.

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Click to expand...
 
I don't get the big deal. You could just boot the system again... or am I missing something completely?
 
You cannot undo a reboot. The alert probably just means exactly that. Once you click the button there is no stopping the process, which might take a while and take your site offline, etc. So the "no undo" refers to the not being able to cancel the process, not to the physical rebooting per-se ... but it is phrased weirdly I admit.
 
OK, it is contridicting itself, that is the point. it should say one of the following:

This operation is not undoable

or

This operation cannot be undone

and not

This operation IS undoable
 
Any sysadmin that has to be specifically told about the undoability of a reboot should probably not be a sysadmin. Ha ha.

"Oh shit, how do I 'unrm -rf /'???"

I wonder what the unreboot command would be. 'shutdown -u now' maybe?
 
Technically unless you do a "shutdown -r now" it is undoable. Shutdown on Mac OS x has a 120 second delay. Even then depending on how you look at it the process of rebooting is "undoing" the action. The state of the computer, assuming the reboot is successful, is brought back to the operational state.

Smashing the Mac with a sledgehmmer is not undoable. "sudo rm -rf /" is not undoable. Rebooting the system does not permanently effect the computer state.

Not the greatest of wording but not unclear on what will happen either.
 
No it doesn't permanently affect the state - but, if you're working as a sysadmin in a large company, and the production database server that's handling 200 simultaneous connections reboots in the middle of the business day, taking 15 minutes' worth of sales, at $10K/hr with it, that argument won't get you far.

I would expect a dialog at that point to be something like a "this is your last chance to back out" warning. In which case, "this action is undoable" is absolutely wrong.
 
So would it reflect badly on the OS or on the Administrator? Futhermore if you are doing, conservatively, ten million dollars a year through your website don't you think you would have clustering or at the very least failover?

I agree that it could be worded better but it would take a truly incompetent admin to click "reboot" and not know what the server is going to do.

EDIT: Pengu, I saw your point to begin with but disagree that it is a problem. Is it unclear that the action "Reboot" is going to disconnect you from the server and reboot it?
 
I would interpret "this action is undoable" to mean that there will be at least one more opportunity to change your mind, before the computer reboots.

Certainly, you would be likely to have failover, and it would look badly mostly for the admin. However, if I were an admin considering what OS to run in production, a couple of unclear dialogs like that could be enough to change my mind - if they can't get something like that right, how bad is the documentation going to be, I might think. After all, if I misunderstood something like that on a production box, it would look pretty bad for me...
 
scruffy said:
I would interpret "this action is undoable" to mean that there will be at least one more opportunity to change your mind, before the computer reboots.
Click to expand...

Perhaps, though it would be considerably better worded as "cancelable". "Undoable" carries the implication that the action can be fully performed in a functional state, but the option still exists to roll back to before the change was performed.
 
Ok. Let me point out a few things:
A) This is not a "production" environment. It is a home server for me to get OSX Server experience on.
B) I never claimed it was a problem for me. I KNOW a reboot is not undoable. I know it will disconnect me.
C) Because this is OS X Server, and the command was issued from the remote admin tool, there is no 120 second dialog saying "Are you sure you want to shutdown/reboot". It asks you in the message attached and when you click Reboot, it starts the reboot process.
 
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