Should be able to shut down an individual talos slave and have it come back up ready to test (correct configuration and auto restart talos buildbot slave).

Most of the lost settings can be found in: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/IT_Talos_Support_Document#A_Talos_Machine_is_Reporting_Strange_Numbers This gives a list of possibilities as to why a talos slave is reporting strange numbers - all these settings need to be correct.

You should be able to put your Linux steps in a startup script - /etc/rc.local might be a good place for it.

OSX is /Library/StartupItems/ . Not a clue about Windows.

OS X is a bit more complicated because hdiutil fails when the Buildbot process doesn't have a parent shell. I saw something on the buildbot-devel list about this recently....http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.buildbot.devel/3295/focus=3296.

I'm seeing some issues with leopard having troubles restarting the talos-slave due to leftover pid files, but it is usually resolved by simply forcing another reboot. I think that we can spin any other reboot issues into new bugs.

Moving closed Future bugs into Release Engineering in preparation for removing the Future component.