Phone was rebooted:
root@castle:/boot# uptime
03:36:18 up 2 min, 0 users, load average: 2.26, 1.26, 0.49

And the file I put in /boot was still there. So no problem changing whats in /boot if you wanted to.

One cool thing, you can connect to the phone again before the GUI is even done loading. I was in while it still said PALM.