We needed today the ability to freeze a set and have no decisions made on elections for some period of time. The exact issue was our code started blowing up the # of connections. We wanted to restart the master w/o having a slave pick up. We could bring down each slave first, but it would be nice just to tell the 'cluster' to not make any decisions on the cluster, but when we tried that we got:

Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 git version: aef371ecf5d2a824f16ccdc3b745f3702165602f
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 sys info: Linux domU-12-31-39-06-79-A1 2.6.21.7-2.ec2.v1.2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Nov 20 17:48:28 EST 2009 x86_64 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_41
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 exception in initAndListen std::exception: old lock file, terminating
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 dbexit:

Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 shutdown: going to close listening sockets...
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 shutdown: going to flush oplog...
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 shutdown: going to close sockets...
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 shutdown: waiting for fs preallocator...
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 shutdown: closing all files...
Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 closeAllFiles() finished

Wed Oct 13 14:40:28 dbexit: really exiting now