systemd shutdown surprise

And not "surprise" in the good sense, I'm afraid.

A few minutes ago, I ran:

  shutdown -h 06:00 Emergency building power maintenance

Of course, I expected the system to alert users of the impending shutdown,
forbid new logins as the shutdown approaches, and then, at the selected
time, halt the system.

But instead, I got:

  First argument '06:00' isn't 'now'. Ignoring.

and the system began shutting down immediately.

Which, since this was a non-critical system, left me with a funny look on my
face. But if it _were_ a critical system, it would not have been so funny.

The shutdown command needs to be made to act like it did before as much as
possible, and to degrade in a non-destructive manner when it's not possible.

It would have been better, of course, to issue an error message like "This
version of shutdown does not support a delay." and then to exit *without*
doing anything. But being able to shut a system down in the future -- or at
least with a little warning to users -- is useful and important.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=624149



-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm@mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
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