I crashed Linux

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

John Chambers wrote:
> 
> Mark J. Dulcey writes:
>
> | I've had cases where the console goes completely dead (you can't
> | see anything on the screen, and the keyboard won't work), but
> | Linux STILL hasn't crashed - just the console code. Did you try
> | using telnet to get into the box? (It hasn't happened to me for a
> | long time, by the way.)
> 
> This did sorta piss me off.  Yeah, the system hadn't crashed.   Lotta
> consolation  that  was.   Wish there were some way to fix it short of
> killing everything I was working on and starting over.  I did a bunch
> of digging through TFM, but didn't find any clues.

At least you can do a proper orderly shutdown, rather than something
violent like power-cycling the box. So your file systems get unmounted
cleanly, and your data isn't in danger.
 
=> On my machine at work, the usual reason for reboots is that  netscape
> has  grabbed the focus with a popup window, and then goes into zombie
> mode. Sometimes if you wait a while, it crashes and then you get your
> screen back, minus the netscape windows. But when this doesn't happen
> after a few minutes, the only way to get your productivity back is to
> reboot. This happens several times a week, giving up times comparable
> to a Windows box.

Netscape gets like that all the time. But I've always been able to
recover by switching to a terminal window and doing 'kill -KILL nnn'
where nnn is the Netscape process ID. I've never had it completely take
over the console, though I have had it make system response VERY slow if
it grabs a huge hunk of memory, making the system thrash.
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