From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Sep 9 22:30: 0 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from jason.argos.org (a1-3a123.neo.rr.com [24.93.180.123]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D1A8C15328; Thu, 9 Sep 1999 22:29:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@argos.org) Received: from localhost (mike@localhost) by jason.argos.org (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id BAA28793; Fri, 10 Sep 1999 01:28:14 -0400 Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 01:28:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Nowlin To: Calvin Cc: Sebastien Gioria , stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD-stable on IBM Netfinity In-Reply-To: <19990910115619.B10017@brel.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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