Why Restart & Shutdown Buttons on login screen

[Berna Massingill]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 09:31:34AM -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote:

>>  On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 15:47 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>  > On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 07:16 -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote:
>>  > > On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 14:02 +0530, "Rahul Tidke" wrote:
>>  > > > Hello All,
>>  > > >   I wonder about these buttons on gnome desktop; do we really need these
>>  > > > buttons on login screen? Reboot and shutdown allowed before login for any
>>  > > > user??
>>  > > > 
>>  > > > Thank You.
>>  > > I find these buttons very useful. My machine double boots. Sometimes I
>>  > > make a mistake  and allow the machine to boot to the wrong OS. Using
>>  > > these buttons I can correct the situation. Other times I boot my machine
>>  > > and I realize before I login that I really wanted to shutdown the
>>  > > machine.
>>  > 
>>  > "your" machine => single-user environment.
>>  
>>  > 
>>  > > But I confused by your question. How does this extra functionality hurt
>>  > > you or anyone else?
>>  > Do you expect arbitrary users to switch off an unattended ("free")
>>  > machine in a lab's or an office's machine pool, a classical workstation
>>  > scenario?
>>  
>>  I assume said machine does not have an on off button. We have this situation
>>   in the lab at the college; 100 of them. Asign warns people not to do what 
>>  you think they should not do. And it mostly works.

Emphasis on "mostly" :-).  (I work at the college in question.)  

>>  It is especially important in this environment because we have
>>  multi-machine programs running on machines that look like they are just
>>  sitting there.

Quite.  Training people not to reboot at the first sign of
trouble has not been 100% effective either.  The multi-machine
programs Aaron mentions sometimes need to run for days or weeks to
produce results, so reboots and shutdowns have real consequences.
Eventually the author of these programs found time to add a
checkpointing capability.  User training only goes so far, after
all, and mistakes are sometimes made.

>>  > Q: How to disable these buttons permanently?

I'm hoping someone will come up with an answer to this question.
The "shutdown" menu option (once one is logged in) is particularly
a problem in that it seems all too easy to select accidentally
when one is trying to log out.

-- blm