Rebooting

Make sure Lassie is enabled in the Linode Manager (it is by default). Linode's boot process is rather custom, and depends on settings from the Linode Manager, so an attempt to reboot from within the Linode just triggers a shutdown. If Lassie is enabled, it'll step in and issue a boot job to boot the Linode again.

Lassie indeed steps in and emulates the normal reboot, just as you described. I was unsure if I was doing something wrong causing shutdown -r now not to operate the normal way. Anyway, all is clear now. Thanks for your reply.

We've discussed this before, it seems like a bad design / bad limitation of behalf of linode that the VPS servers can't be properly rebooted when Lassie is disabled.