Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 10 Sep 1999 01:28:14 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Mike Nowlin <mike@argos.org>
To:        Calvin <hangdog@letterbox.com>
Cc:        Sebastien Gioria <gioria@FreeBSD.ORG>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD-stable on IBM Netfinity
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.05.9909100121450.28711-100000@jason.argos.org>
In-Reply-To: <19990910115619.B10017@brel.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

>   Oh, I have a problem with rebooting.  It doesn't work.
>   It will shutdown, but doesn't reboot.  Someone has 
>   to manually off-wait-on the machine.  Though luck for
>   me since I am administering it off-site.  Reboot is
>   not an option for me. :(

I found a cheap and easy solution for this kind of problem -- covers
crashes as well -- 

Grab a PIC chip and burn a quick program into it to look for some sort of
reset signal -- I use a character pumped out of a serial port -- a little
daemon program sends out this character every 20-25 seconds.  If the PIC
doesn't see the character with some time period (I use 5 minutes), it
shorts the reset line on the motherboard.

Problems with doing it this way: 

1)  In single-user mode (or any mode where the daemon isn't running),
it'll happily reset the computer for you after the timeout expires...
Since I'm always AT the computer when it's in this sort of mode, I put a
little switch wired into the PIC -- if it's on, don't send the reset
signal...

2)  Large drives being fsck'd will sometimes take longer than the timeout
-- same problem as above, but can get ugly -- fsck, timeout, reboot --
fsck, timeout, reboot -- etc.....  Adjusting the timeout fixes it, but I'm
planning a more elegant solution.....

--mike




To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.LNX.4.05.9909100121450.28711-100000>