I've just exorcised a ghost of the old VRRP CLI implementation — the "reset vrrp master" command. I thought it would go away with the vyatta-vrrp package, but in fact it was in vyatta-op. It made me remember that I was going to write about it in the original blog post, but somehow I forgot about it.
Here is why that command was not reimplemented. First, it never worked with preempt to begin with, and with preempt being the default, its usefulness was already limited.
A more serious reason, however, is that it was a rather horrible (even if ingenious) kludge. This is how it worked: first it tried to locate the VRRP group in keepalived.conf, then it would remove it from the config, restart keepalived, insert it again, and restart keepalived again. It sort of worked, but you can see how fragile this approach is. If anything at any stage would go wrong, it would leave VRRP in an inconsistent state.
A much cleaner and general way to do it is to just disable the VRRP group in conf mode (set high-availability vrrp group Foo disable) and commit the change.