No Mouse or Keyboard after re-boot
 

Red Hat 9, using as FTP server. Mouse, monitor, and Keyboard connected through KVM.
We had to power down for an electrical upgrade to the building. Upon re-starting the box, the mouse and keyboard were not available, had monitor, but no KB& Mouse. Normally this don't happen, but once before when it did they unplugged the box and it never re-booted. We wound up re-installing the OS and all 300 FTP accounts. The box is currently up and working fine, I just can't maintain accounts without being able to log in. My question is "Is there anyway I can re-boot this box without fear of losing all the data and/or OS ? I tried telnet but could not get in.

Thankx,
John

Have you tried to access by SSH?

If that doesn't work then you probably don't have much choice but to reboot!

It's best if there isnt any data being written to disk when you reboot - have someone unplug the network cable first.

The probability of data loss if there is data being written depends on the filesystem in use:

ext2 - quite likely but the recovery tools are good and it'll try and recover on boot. Unlikely (but possible) to lose much.
ext3 - data loss very unlikely
xfs - likely
reiserfs - I don't know

If you don't know then you're probably running ext2 or 3.

If you're really paranoid (and don't have backups?) then I suppose you could FTP all the data off it first!

Gary

I haven't tried SSH, no experience with it...yet. I believe SSH is open in the firewall because our former Linux Guru used it. He has since moved on to greener pa$tures. The FTP data is usually removed and processed within an hour of posting so the only thing I would need to back up is the accounts. I believe ext2 is being used and the likelyhood of data being being written is high since the files coming up are in the hundreds of MB and it happens 24/7.

Thankx Gary

From another linux box try:

ssh root@my.domain.com

And you should get a password prompt in a few seconds.

Some boxes don't allow root logins by SSH. In that case you need to ssh to a different user then use "su -" to change to root.

If you do need to reboot, unplug the network cable 15 minutes before. That way no-one can upload anything and anything in process of being written should be not still be writing to disk.

From windows you can get a program called Putty SSH.

SSH worked. Now that I know that, I'm a dangerous man.

Thankx again,
John:study: