Adam Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 11:33 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 20:08 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> The problem, as has already been mentioned and which you seem to
have
overlooked is that when an administrator finds it's locked up, it's
too
late to fix it.
If it is really locked up, the current change won't affect you. A
half
struck system, it is matter of restarting and resetting it. You can
avoid that even, if you read up what has changed as any good
administrator should.
My system just locked up. No response to Ctrl-Alt-BSpace, Ctrl-Alt-Fn,
even Ctrl-Alt-Del. I logged in via ssh from my iPhone and brought it
down gently, though I could of course have simply changed run levels.
In this kind of situation it would be nice to have an unblockable
attention key, like SysRq but not so low-level. Something that would
simply force the system into VT2 for example, and didn't depend on X
working.
You can't do that, really. Getting to vt2 requires getting X to let go
of the hardware, because the vt subsystem is a raging pile of trash that
we would be _far_ better off just deleting. Read that again: X has to
voluntarily relinquish the hardware. If it isn't responding to c-a-bs,
it certainly isn't going to respond to any other requests.
One reason X won't listen for c-a-bs is that it's configured not to. And
that's now the default setting.
But nooooo. Gotta keep having VTs so we can recover when X screws up.
I mean, it's the unix way. Which apparently means designing failure in
from the start, and calling it a feature.
I do most of my work at VTs, I configure an even dozen of them on most
of my systems, and then use screen for good measure. I also boot with
VGA=794, and where that doesn't work I use modprobe and fbset to get a
1280x1024 framebuffer. If I can't get that, I really do not want to use
that computer.
This is a bad design. The panic button doesn't make it better, it just
makes it okay to be even worse than the design requires. Take the
training wheels off already.
<rolls eyes>
--
Cheers
John
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