[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#598891: [v-admins] Bug#598891: Bug#598891: sysvinit: shutdown time message is too noisy, prints too many messages

[Debian bug at v.nix.is]

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 22:20, Timo Juhani Lindfors <timo.lindfors at iki.fi> wrote:
> "Debian bug at v.nix.is" <debian-bug at v.nix.is> writes:
>> Being reminded >10 times in 4 hours I think is a bit too much.
>
> Since shutdown does not know who saw the message somebody could login
> 10 minutes before shutdown and could have use for these more regular
> alerts.

Right, but the frequency of messages is still a matter of sysadmin
policy.

> Imho the best option would be to allow users to acknowledge that they
> have seen the warning. They could then choose if they want to see
> further warnings or not.

That solution would require some way for mortal users to communicate
with a root-run process, presumably via some ~/.stop-shutdown-spam
file in their home directory or something like that.

Any scheme in that direction I can think of would require some sort of
ad-hoc communication, and even if you get that right you'd still need
action on part of the users to make the messages stop.

What sort of scheme did you have in mind for doing this?

I think it's informative to look at how other Unix systems do
this. E.g. from the Solaris shutdown(1M) manpage:

     The warning message and the user provided message are output
     when  there  are  7200, 3600, 1800, 1200, 600, 300, 120, 60,
     and 30 seconds remaining before shutdown begins.

So on Debian if you'd started a shutdown to commence in two hours
you'd get (as we've established) messages at:

    (240 150 120 90 60 45 30 15 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1)

But on Solaris that would be:

    (120 60 30 20 10 5 2 1)

Since Solaris manages to do with 8 messages instead of 17 I don't see
why there shouldn't be something like a -v switch that could be given
a verbosity level, e.g.:

    # No warning messages, only the *NOW* message
    -v 0 (0)
    # An initial, warning and a *NOW* message
    -v 1 (120 5 1 0)
    # Another warning 30 minutes in advance
    -v 2 (120 30 5 1 0)
    # This corresponds to Solaris
    -v 3 (120 60 30 20 10 5 2 1)
    # This corresponds to Debian now
    -v 5 (240 150 120 90 60 45 30 15 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1)
    # Even noisier for busy sites
    -v 6 (240 200 180 ...

While -v5 and -v6 would be appropriate for big systems with a lot of
users -v2 would be closer to what I'd want for my systems with few
users who are usually constantly logged in to interactive terminals.

Does this plan sound OK? Would you be opposed to a patch that
implements it?

Thanks for your time on this issue.