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I am currently remotely upgrading a friend's computer with aptitude through SSH. I have bad memories of unstable systems when they are rebooted/shut down during an upgrade process, so I'd like to prevent him from rebooting the computer (he has a desktop session opened) when he comes back home if the upgrade is still running - or at least warn him.

How do I do that?

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  • If you open a text document, type some stuff, and leave it open, won't it prompt to save it before it shuts down? If you type something like "I'm SSH'd in, DON'T SHUT DOWN!", he'll see that if he tries to shut it down.
    – SaintWacko
    Sep 26, 2012 at 14:38
  • A long long time ago.... (Slackware 2 time) the easiest solution was to start a shutdown with a long delay. If someone else tried to invoke a shutdown they would get a shutdown is already running error. (E.g. shutdown +10h "Wait with rebooting! I am busy atm. Joe.")
    – Hennes
    Sep 26, 2012 at 16:38

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Just remove him temporarily from the list of sudoers, or from any other group that would have access to the shutdown/reboot commands. You have to have special privileges to shutdown or reboot a machine.

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    Does this apply to all methods of shutting down, or just the command line?
    – SaintWacko
    Sep 26, 2012 at 14:41
  • I'm not sure how "other methods" work, but from man reboot: These programs allow a system administrator to reboot, halt or poweroff the system.
    – m4573r
    Sep 26, 2012 at 14:44
  • I mean from the menu in the GUI. Or is this a distro without a GUI? I don't have a ton of experience with the various flavours of Linux.
    – SaintWacko
    Sep 26, 2012 at 14:51
  • I understood the question. I just don't know what method would be implemented in whatever desktop/window manager of whatever distro. I assume that ultimately it would resort to those commands, and that if you prevent the user to access it, it will do the trick.
    – m4573r
    Sep 26, 2012 at 15:02
  • Oh, I see. Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were questioning the concept of other methods besides a command line reboot.
    – SaintWacko
    Sep 26, 2012 at 15:04

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