System Freezes

[Steve Flynn]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 1:24 PM, Jesse Brent Coats
<jbcoats at cablespeed.com> wrote:
> Occasionally my system freezes where the only thing that seems to work
> is to power-off the system.  Ctl-Alt delete doesn't work.  Ctl-Alt PF(1
> through 7) doesn't work.  Any suggestions?

Does Ctrl-Alt-Backspace have any effect?
Do you have another machine with which you can ssh/telnet into the
"frozen" box with?

If not, given that you can't swap to another session you're not going
to be able to see any messags in the syslog so you're going to want to
attempt to persuade the kernel to close down and flush as much data as
possible to the logs. You can do this with the Alt-SysReq and R, E, I,
S, U B to perform as much of a clean shutdown as possible. This should
(if the Kernel is still remotely responsive) flush logs, free
file-handles and initiate a system reboot. Upion reboot you can take a
look at the syslog and attempt diagnosis of the issue.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key for more info and
other SysReq commands.
-- 
Steve
When one person suffers from a delusion it is insanity. When many
people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.

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