CentOS - Apr 2008 - last resort before hard reboot

Is there a resource for CentOS for things to do before a hard reboot?

My situation is apparently an out of memory condition where I am seeing
fatal 'oops' output all over the place, Ctrl-Alt-F3 (for example) new
console login attempts will accept credentials and then never get to a login
prompt. Remoting in is just as useless. I cannot therefore use any of the
standard restart commands, since I cannot enter commands.

By default in CentOs (and on my machine) Alt- SysRq is disabled.

Do I have any other options before hard resetting the box?

Thanks,

- Joshua
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080421/b4cbdc14/attachment-0001.html>

On Monday, April 21, 2008 at 6:32 PM, Joshua Frankamp wrote:
> Is there a resource for CentOS for things to do before a hard reboot?
>
> My situation is apparently an out of memory condition where I am seeing
> fatal 'oops' output all over the place, Ctrl-Alt-F3 (for example)
new
> console login attempts will accept credentials and then never get to a 
> login
> prompt. Remoting in is just as useless. I cannot therefore use any of the
> standard restart commands, since I cannot enter commands.
>
> By default in CentOs (and on my machine) Alt- SysRq is disabled.
>
> Do I have any other options before hard resetting the box?
>
> Thanks,
>
> - Joshua
A quick press of the on/off switch initiates an orderly shutdown on most 
modern systems.

Probably more reliable, from a console (logged in or not), the universal 
window$ repair procedure ([Alt][Ctrl][Del]) initiates an orderly reboot 
(init 6).  If it appears to be ineffective, it can be repeated multiple 
times to trigger the reboot.  Again, the result is the same you would expect 
from typing "init 6".

Given what you have described, you may need to wait a while for either 
approach to be effective.

Steve