I was exploring commands on the ASA a while back and discovered that you can run commands on the standby unit from the active. It’s a bit weird, though, since you actually run the commands from config mode.
As an example, if you want to do a show interface OUTSIDE on the standby unit to see what the status is, you would do this.
firewall(config)#failover exec standby show interface OUTSIDE Interface Ethernet0/0 "OUTSIDE", is up, line protocol is up Hardware is i82546GB rev03, BW 1000 Mbps, DLY 10 usec <SNIP>
Pretty handy when you want to know information about the other firewall without having to log into that sucker (and getting confused by the same prompts and reloading the wrong mate).
Send any misplaced commands questions my way.
Personally, I always set "prompt hostname state", not always necessary when using connection managers like securecrt but is very comforting when wanting to reboot secondaries or working via console.
Can even go as far as “prompt hostname priority state” but really when you are working in a HA pair the primary is only a name.
Its even better than that, you can use it to send commands the other way (from standby to active). Predictably the syntax for this is "failover exec active …". This has come in handy on the couple of occasions that one of our primary units has stopped accepting management traffic for whatever reason.