I've searched a while now and I've found plenty of threads where people haven't been able to "shutodown -r" from their console and I understand that issue pretty well--but that's not what's happening here. Just the opposite, actually. When I issue a shutdown or reboot command via the lish console, my linode never really shuts down, but rather it just waits for about 2 minutes and then halts and starts to boot. I don't remember making any changes that would affect this, but I think I may have messed up my inittab. Any ideas on what I should check next?

This is a bug on our end -- introduced when I deployed a new version of the host libraries a few days ago. Somehow the call to "control-alt-delete" isn't getting passed to the UML kernel.

I plan on looking into this over the next few days.

In the meantime, issue a reboot/shutdown/poweroff inside your console or ssh session to get a clean shutdown.

-Chris

Fast and informative, as always