[vishnu]

And just as a side note, don't ever, ever, *ever* shutdown an Octane from its power switch. Use 'shutdown -p' and then sit there for a minute until it asks you if you really mean to shut it down (or not), and type "yes." The Octane will then shut itself off. The power button's only valid use is to turn an Octane on.

I've never heard this before. May inquire as to your experience that led to this advice?

While I fully admit, XFS is probably one of the best journaling filesystems, filesystem corruption is not your friend. Let the kernel take care of shutting down. If IRIX works the way it's supposed to, pushing the power button will transfer the shutdown to the kernel, but it's not worth the risk. If you really want to experiment with how good XFS is, just yank the power plug, and see how well it comes back up.