Huge wrote:
On 2008-09-30, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
Gotde T Shirt writes:
On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:10:19 -0700 (PDT), Jethro wrote:

I want to be able to power-cycle my loft based PC ... anyone know of a
good reliable remote control plug ?
Power cycling a Windows PC via the mains power input isn't to be
recommended, because it can lead to disk corruption. You're supposed to
shut it down (or restart it) gracefully from within Windows.
He might be running a less fragile OS ;-)

it doesn't matter what OS he's running: power cyckling is the only
option when all other methods have failed.

I'm just trying to remember the last time I had to reboot a Solaris system
because "all other methods have failed", bearing in mind that I've been
responsible for thousands of them over decades. And the answer is ... so rarely
does it happen that I cannot remember.

Oh, I had two or three in my time. Mainly overheated and crashed
completely due to fan failures.

A power cycle got them going long enough to do emergency access stuff
before we could get to them and replace the fans.

A lot depends on what access you have to e.g. serial ports.


A lot of times we couldn't TELNET in and if we didnt have reverse
terminal servers to use as serial boot devices, we would power cyccle if
they had frozen and wouldn't accept a network connection.


However that generally didn't work if they were FSCKed..reverse terminal
servers were better as you could with the error messages in boot..and go
down with the right bits of hardware.