In playing around with my linode, there have been plenty of times when I've deleted the disk image for a running linode. Once I created a new distribution image while the deleted image was still running, and ended up shutting down the server, deleting the image, and recreating the image again because of concerns about corruption from the old running server on the new image. (I don't know if that concern is warranted or not.)

Seems to me it would be pretty simple if, in deleting an image, linode.com would either shut down the server gracefully or refuse to continue until the server was shutdown.

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John Schofield
Apple Certified Technical Coordinator
Office Mechanic Consulting
Mac, Unix, and PC Computer Support
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It's perfectly fine to erase a file (disk image) in Linux while it's still open and being used by applications. Once all the references to the open file are closed (when you shutdown your Linode) will the file really be gone.

I thought about requiring the Linode to be shutdown before being able to delete an "active" disk image, but I decided against it. This is kind of a "feature" since you can let the host setup a new distro (when you're tight on space) while the other is still running, thereby reducing downtime...

If someone really wanted to use some extra space, they could boot their Linode with some disk images, delete the disk images and create new ones -- but they'd never be able to use the new disk images until they shutdown or rebooted -- and by that time the deleted disk images would be gone anyway.

Hope that answers your question.