[weblacky]

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.

So if I'm understanding you correctly you're saying that you've had experiences where when you press the power button instead of the kernel starting to shut down the message doesn't get past correctly and the system's board just times out and pulls power? Is that what you're saying? Otherwise I'm a little confused how a software shut down of the kernel via the button is different than the software shutdown via command. So I could only assume you're saying that there's a chance that the command doesn't make it to the kernel but the system shuts down anyway after some amount of seconds?