Can you disable the reload command?

Someone has recently asked an interesting question - can you disable the reload command? Although I would strongly discourage you from doing that (after all, every router I've ever worked on since a venerable MGS running IOS 10.0 had to be reloaded every now and then), here's what you can do:

• define an alias for the reload command that does something else. For example, alias exec reload show ip interface brief. While this would remind a careless operator, it would still not prevent someone using an abbreviation like relo to reload the device.
• Use TACACS+ command accounting and disable the reload command on the TACACS+ server. The benefit of this approach is that you can do it on user-by-user basis ... but of course you need TACACS+ server, RADIUS will not do.
• Disable the reload command with the Embedded Event Manager applet.

The applet to disable the reload command would be similar to this one:

event manager applet NoReload
 event cli pattern "reload" sync no skip yes
 action 1.0 syslog priority errors msg "Cannot reload this router"

Note: this article is part of You've asked for it series.