[PLUG] Baby killing Linux

Shahms King shahms at shahms.com
Thu Jun 19 13:45:02 UTC 2003


Said he couldn't ssh into it, but I'd like to know if it's ping-able or
not.  The best way I know of to quickly "hang" a Linux box is to
convince the X server to consume all of your available resources (or, at
the very least, all of the CPU for a good long while).  Sadly, this
isn't always difficult to do on accident, but I seem to have a good deal
of trouble doing it on purpose ;-)

On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 13:29, Linux.Administrator at odot.state.or.us wrote:
> Can you access the box via the network? I've had the screen lock up on me
> before, but SSH into it and killing the process usually brings it back.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Montagne [mailto:montagne at boora.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 1:23 PM
> To: plug at lists.pdxlinux.org
> Subject: [PLUG] Baby killing Linux
> 
> 
> This is a mystery.  My two year old can sit down and completely lock up
> my Linux box with a few keystrokes.  I'm assured she is only there for a
> minute and this is probably true.  When I got home, there was an xterm
> up with the string "  n   " on it.  Everything else was locked up.  No
> keyboard, no mouse, no sshing in from a different machine, nothing.
> Only option was a reboot.  Not good after my preaching about power,
> reliability, and robustness.
> 
> So, what did she do?  If you had a few seconds to completely disable a
> Linux system how would you do it?  Probably only with keystrokes and
> not lgged in as root.  This has happened several times.
-- 
Shahms King <shahms at shahms.com>





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