I have experienced a couple of power failures since installing CentOS 5, both while I was working on the system. The first time, several weeks ago, I thought there was some "feature" that I had never seen before but couldn't really put my finger on it. The power came back on after a few seconds and I never missed a beat. I also shrewdly forgot about the anomaly that I had almost noticed.
I had a real power failure 2 days ago and tried to be more observant. What had gotten my attention earlier is that the once-familiar banner displayed on about everything except my room's ceiling was missing.
After some red herrings and blind alleys (hey, you don't have to worry about mixed metaphors when you're an illiterate old coot!) I decided that the missing banners and the fact that the power was killed while a graphical page was displayed was what I saw.
Anyhow, it seems that these extinct banners were a function of the /bin/shutdown routine in SysVinit because banners happen in CentOS 4.x whether the shutdown command is issued by fingers or by a UPS monitoring daemon. And I have since found that they're gone from CentOS 5, no matter how shutdown is invoked.
After all of this, my question boils down to one of replacing the current SysVinit package, SysVinit-2.86-14.i386.rpm with the one from CentOS 4.x, SysVinit-2.85-34.3.i386.rpm Would that be courting disaster?