I reboot Ubuntu 5x a week

[Steve Flynn]

On 23 July 2012 13:57, Bas Roufs <basroufs at gmail.com> wrote:

> In my case - Kubuntu 12.04- I have quite similar problems. At present I need
> to reset the system at least once a day. Often the system "freezes" to such
> an extend, that I can simply not move any more anything  - no cursor, no
> mouse click, nothing.  in such circumstances, I simply need to turn of and
> turn on the PC in order to get the system movable again.

When this happens Bas, do you ever use the SysReq keystrokes to try to
flush as much data out to disk and then eyeball the syslog after the
reboot or do you just hit the reset button and carry on as normal
after the machine comes up?

For info on SysReq keystrokes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Specifically, the following:

Uses

A common use of the magic SysRq key is to perform a safe reboot of a
Linux computer which has otherwise locked up. This can prevent a fsck
being required on reboot and gives some programs a chance to save
emergency backups of unsaved work.[5] The QWERTY (or AZERTY)
mnemonics: "Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring", "Reboot Even If
System Utterly Broken" or simply the word "BUSIER" read backwards, are
often used to remember the following Sysrq-keys sequence:

unRaw      (take control of keyboard back from X),
 tErminate (send SIGTERM to all processes, allowing them to terminate
gracefully),
 kIll      (send SIGKILL to all processes, forcing them to terminate
immediately),
  Sync     (flush data to disk),
  Unmount  (remount all filesystems read-only),
reBoot.

By going through this key sequence, you give the kernel as maximum
opportunity to close the system down cleanly, which includes syncing
and systems logs to disk.. logs which hopefully give you a clue as you
what is causing the problem.

If you get absolutely no response from the machine when going through
these keys, then you have a *exceptionally* hard crash or you have a
hardware issue (over heating, bad ram, power supply issues, etc).

Gather some info on what is causing your lock-ups and there will be
someone here who can help you resolve them... probably! :)


--
Steve

When one person suffers from a delusion it is insanity. When many
people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.