[camtarn]

"[explanation of acpid] But I'm on a virtual server that I don't intend to suspend/resume. I am going to remove it for fun and see what happens. ... I was able to successfully reboot the droplet but after halt Digital Ocean thought it was still on so I had to Power Off using the web interface. So I should probably keep this."

Science! :D

I love the approach of systematically going through and prodding everything to see what things do and whether they're actually required. I remember doing this on my Windows 95 machine, stripping down running tasks using Task Manager. Of course, in Windows 95, if you killed the wrong task the system would just reboot... :P

[dguaraglia]

I used to do a lot of that when I was first learning Linux (back in the day when each Linux distro came with a full "HOWTO" collection.) I have become much lazier since, usually going for defaults and not touching anything unless I need the behavior to change.

[vbernat]

I don't think acpid would help much for the halt command. However, it would enable to halt the machine from the web console.