I have a RH 7.2 system running on a Gateway E-4200. I decided to run an ftp server on it, so yesterday I downloaded, compiled, and installed the latest version of "pure ftp". Everything was going fine until I added the line

to my rc.local startup file, and restarted.

The machine came up with a black screen with nothing but a blinking cursor on it. The machine does not respond to any keyboard input.

However, I can tell that the machine is completely up and running fine: it has a Tomcat server and a MySQL database that are both delivering web pages as they normally do. I can hit it with a browser from another machine and get the expected response.

I do not have any kind of shell access to the machine.

So I came up with a plan to shut it down.

On a different machine, used crontab -e to create a crontab entry "*/10 * * * * shutdown -h now". FTP is the only kind of access I have to the machine, so I FTPed /var/spool/cron/root, which, as far as I can tell, contains the crontab entry, from the good machine to the corresponding place on the bad machine. However, that did not cause the machine to shut down.

The only other way I can think of is to interrupt the power.

Any way to get this machine to shut down? Any idea why it's acting like this in the first place? (black screen, no keyboard input.)

Ethan

Won't Ctrl + Alt + F2 open a new tty so you can kill pure-ftp w/ top?

ssh?

ftp your local.rc down, comment the line you added, ftp it back and use ctrl + alt + del to reboot, or hit the power.

You should always have a back door to your system, I prefer a secure one - ssh.

As I said, no keyboard input, so couldn't switch to a new tty. I would up just FTPing a new rc.local with the offending command commented out, then interrupting power. Everything was fine after that.

That does demonstrate that I should have a "backdoor" to the machine. I had no telnet on it for security. Don't know how to set up ssh, but I'll investigate.

Thanks,

Ethan