Comments | lionsphil: What do you mean Perl is cheating? They had *Emacs*!

lionsphil

What do you mean Perl is cheating? They had Emacs!

Dec 20, 2009 14:38

Most people who have more than a passing interest in UNIXen probably know the UNIX recovery legend.

I just managed to remotely reboot a cranky Linux system that had once again had a ATA whoopsie and decided to remount the root filesystem read-only, and throw I/O errors all over the place (hypothesis: everything not cached; generally the things ( Read more... )

linux

Comments 5

Fascinating read, and a legend which I had indeed not seen before. bugarup December 21 2009, 12:55:43 UTC

I'm currently looking forward to taking an introductory C & UNIX module next semester. Got an excellent lecturer for it, even though he does have what he describes as "senior moments" of forgetfulness a lot lately. Which books would you suggest I read as a first preliminary? Currently have both 3rd and 4th ed. of UNIX in a Nutshell, and also Kernighan & Ritchie's book on C sitting on my shelf - both were on the reading list (well ... the two editions of the O'Reilly volume were more of a fluke, tbh).

Which should I start with? Also, anything else you'd particularly recommend to a beginning FOSS engineer-in-training over teh holey days? Debian lenny's been giving me a wee bit of admin trouble as it is, but that might well just be the laptop's wifi firmware and nvidia kernel module I'm using now.

Re: Fascinating read, and a legend which I had indeed not seen before. lionsphil December 21 2009, 14:51:15 UTC

Dunno. I'm not much one for dead tree, but I believe K&R's C book is reasonably respected.

UNIX in a Nutshell is probably hilariously out of date, as modern Linux has thrown away as much of the original UNIX philosophy as it can, keeping only the worst bits (like continually aiming for 90%-max solutions).

Re: Fascinating read, and a legend which I had indeed not seen before. mair_aw December 23 2009, 12:45:56 UTC

I read the C book, and the last month of the purist C newsgroup, whose exact name I've forgotten. comp.lang.c.something I expect.

Easier option oshepherd April 24 2010, 12:19:44 UTC

echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
(Reboot)

If the filesystem hadn't already remounted as readonly, I'd use
echo sub > /proc/sysrq-trigger
(Sync filesystems, remount as read only, reboot)

Knowing the Ctrl+Alt+SysRq commands is very handy when dealing with misbehaving Linux machines.

Re: Easier option lionsphil April 24 2010, 12:21:37 UTC

Ooh, cheers; I knew you could do that with the physical SysRq key, but didn't know there was a /proc interface too.