This should be a simple question: why could a gentoo vps (stock image, 32bit) shutdown and never come up when i run 'reboot'?
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Oct 15 14:30:09 ln shutdown[17350]: shutting down for system reboot
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Do it from lish and see if any error messages are produced.

If you wait a minute or two, you should get a Lassie initiated boot anytime you shutdown from within your linode. I just checked and it works fine on my gentoo system (running 2.6.30.5-x86_64-linode8). Check the "Settings and Utilities" tab of the Linode Manager to see if it is enabled for you. In fact, Lassie is so aggressive that she will restart you even if you do a "shutdown -h".

If you don't want to wait for Lassie, you can initiate the reboot from the Linode Manager or within a Lish session.

Yeah, Lassie does it's job but here's what I've noticed:
newark18 - works as expected
newark35, newark65 - doesn't start after reboot.
The same Gentoo image. So I guess it has smth to do with newer server configs.
Will be getting to lish later.

mispost

OK, tried rebooting via lish.
The last message I see before screen terminates is that the system will be rebooted.

I could be emitting complete hot air here, and if so caker will correct me --

'reboot' and such in Linux will communicate to the kernel that a warm reboot is to be attempted. In our environment, there's no such thing. When you issue 'reboot', your guest domain goes away, and Lassie will jump in and issue a boot job to your Linode.

It's all the same to our system. Your domU was there, and then it wasn't. I don't think we know if you issued a 'reboot' from your Linode, because it probably tries to fire ACPI commands for a warm reset...which Xen might completely ignore.

These are all guesses, but educated ones. My suspicion is that 'reboot' is blindly saying "warm reset, please", Xen is ignoring it, and destroying the domain. This is probably why when you issue a reboot to your Linode from the Linode Manager, you get a "shutdown" job and a "boot" job.

(Aside: Higher host numbers aren't necessarily indicative of newer software. In this particular case, newark18 actually has "newer" software than newark35. We probably rebooted it at some point. Edit: Yep.)

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.