Lukas Loesche's questions

Problem: The SSDs in our servers require a power cycle (i.e. off/on, not reset/warm reboot) after a firmware update.

Thoughts: Using 'ipmitool chassis power cycle' I can cycle the server's power. However this would cut the power while the system is still running, filesystems are mounted, etc.

What I basically want is a delayed power cycle so the system has a chance to halt. But I guess that would have to be implemented on the server's IPMI board, so it's not really an option.

My initial idea was to dynamically create a ramdisk containing the tool and libs and somehow integrate that into the halt process. I saw there's a /etc/init.d/halt, so that would be my starting point. Although I believe the kernel at some point in the shutdown process starts to kill off remaining processes. So I'm not even sure if that's a viable way.

Question: What would be the best way to execute ipmitool (or any other command), after the system has halted and all regular filesystems are unmounted?

I just noticed that most of the ssh pubkeys in my authorized_keys end on == or =

E.g.

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA9ZUwxXn2HZAAUswoaV8t2sQPvolVWDI053f0giNN154Zyi9FtWJKvyLHXoxW4IzFxgx+m6EYqXG/XCtfamLhwvGZv9FXkgQKeF6HJv/rjyKRBHPRyX0vV4S9uQU+xQV7f0Ock3urSzbUyoCgngA8Ax6AkYGmMTLLjx1HOBO/TJ477aysWt4IAg1gviT50I4xOYiHT4vC67czoDTnPl0UfKQJaM0+6WrneK7FJbd/8CAX7P7IxOhj1OxVbnEoh9FvecLbSDdOx/LF+kJcav/LThuoG7NR+Y+rS9lNkta3/KPi3IBMPum+bZpXJF7fkHl9Kx/iOMitT7KjNW/mty74xw== foo@bar

However today I saw a pubkey without an equal sign at the end. Also I noticed that the only place where an = ever occurs in a pubkey is at the end and never anywhere else.

Now I'm just curious as to what is the meaning of zero, one or two equal signs at the end of a pub key?