Summary: Rebooting

I would like to thank everyone who replied to my email, here is a list:

Jeremy Rodriguez
Chris de Vidal
Angel Rivera
Jon Masters
Dan Simoes
Bertrand Hutin
Klaasjan Brand
Neil Dombrowski
Chris Scheller
D. Stimits
Bob Finch

I should have made a better description of the problem in the original
email. The system is located at a Colocation center that is over a
thousand miles away from my current location and I was having trouble
getting the support staff to respond. The computer was operating, but
the main hard drive had suffered a failure. The only things that were
still operating were the programs that just happened to be in memory. So
I could ssh into the computer, but that was about it. I could access the
/proc and /dev without problems. But the / directory was gone. This made
all programs that I tried to run give an input/output error when I
attempted to execute them. So the commands "reboot, halt, shutdown,
telinit, init, etc" were unusable. I was basically looking for a way to
force the machine to reboot without using a command line program. This
system runs RedHat 7.3 with the latest kernel on a 1gHz P-III.

Several people sugguested that if I had a serial console access to the
machine that I should try the MagicSysRq commands:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/security-sysrq.html

But, since I didn't have serial console access this was out, but it was
very interesting reading.

Other sugguested that I get a remote controled power switch, that could
be controled over a web interface. I use those devices here at work (The
server in question is my personal server, so this option wasn't
available), and I can recommend them. The ones that we use here are from
APC.

I would have to say that the most interesting reply was from Jon
Masters, who sugguested that if I would send him a copy of the
System.map file and the kernel image, that he would supply me with a
string to cat to /proc/kcore to overwrite one of the scheduler routines
to cause a jump to the reboot code on the next timer tick (this all
depended on which architecture I was using). Now this I would have like
to have seen in action.

Again, thank you to all who replied. I love this list, it is a great
resource for us all.

-- 
===========================
Ron Reed
RedHat Certified Engineer
Unix Systems Administrator
ARM SGP CART Site
(580)388-4053
[email protected]
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