I crashed Linux

[mike at bilow.com (Michael Bilow)]

Nice to see yellowbank.com back with us!

I've crashed Linux lots of times.  We have one ancient server that usually
goes hundreds of days between reboots, and at least half of its crashes
have been a result of building electrical failures.  (Hurricanes have
accounted for two such crashes!)  Next to that, the most common cause of
crashes is that the SCSI tape drive in the machine hangs up, and this
requires a power cycle.  Any hardware or drivers, which is what is at
issue with your scanner, has a fairly high potential to hang the machine.  
This is actually one of the big things that makes PCs unsuitable for
high-availability environments where mainframes are typically used.

-- Mike


On 2000-12-06 at 23:47 -0500, Ron Peterson wrote:

> I crashed Linux.  For the first time.  I didn't think it was possible.
> 
> I was trying to get my old Microtek ScanMaker E3 going vis-a-vis RH 7.0,
> kernel 2.4-test10 and SANE 1.0.3.  It was ugly, but it wasn't pretty. 
> SANE's 'scanimage' saw my scanner o.k., but when I ran:
> 
> scanimage --format=tiff --mode Color --speed 2
> --device=microtek:/dev/scanner -l 0 -t 0 -x 100 -y 150 
> 
> the scanner just make a couple of blurps, then... nothing.  My KDE
> session was dead.  I killed X o.k., but then I couldn't get a console. 
> I had to hard reboot.
> 
> I don't really know what the point of this post is.  Just interesting
> that it could even happen.  I guess it is a test kernel.
> 
> -Ron-

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