On 0, "Michael D. Crawford" <crawford@goingware.com> wrote: [snip] > Now my sad experience. I was running a kernel before (2.4.14 for PowerPC) > that I guess must have been buggy because I would get sudden lockups from > time to time. It seemed to come when there was a lot of filesystem > activity, such as when doing an update. Progress of the update would halt, > X11 would become unresponsive, and I'd have to power off the machine. I > couldn't ssh in to sync the disk. Did you know that you can configure your kernel for 'magic alt-sysrq' keys for recovery in this sort of situation? Alt+sysqr+s syncs discs, alt+sysrq+u remounts everything read-only, alt+sysrq+b reboots the machine. These are available in all but the absolute worst of kernel disasters. Unfortunately you need to re-compile the kernel to reconfigure them. I'm not sure if the stock debian kernel supports them - it is configuration definition CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ. As for your other comments, syncing the disks may well help. Journalled filesystems were made for this sort of thing. Tom -- Tom Cook Information Technology Services, The University of Adelaide "My advice to you is to get married: If you find a good wife, you will be happy; if not, you will become a philosopher." - Socrates Get my GPG public key: https://pinky.its.adelaide.edu.au/~tkcook/tom.cook-at-adelaide.edu.au
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