That's a good point and I hadn't considered it. It still reboots your Linode, though; worth considering a 'echo "I just rebooted! Did you expect that?" | mail' in your rc.local for this reason, since a reboot should be an infrequent event.
yeah, but will likely reboot it into recovery mode so they can remove anything like that from your boot sequence anyway, and if they don't notice it, they will be done by the time it goes out anyway. External monitoring is the best way to notice the node went down.