Why should I use fallback-reboot (AKA "FBR")?


Because it might save you a trip to the workplace on an evening, weekend, or holiday sometime.
  • fallback-reboot is a last resort, when you have a wedged system that you'd like to reboot remotely. It requires that the machine be pingable, but it does not require that machine's hard disk be functional, nor does it require fork() or exec*() to be working. In theory at least, it should not require paging or swapping to be working either
  • fallback-reboot reboots the machine hard - it makes no attempt to sync your disks. That's because fallback-reboot assumes that you've already tried all the methods of doing an orderly shutdown you can think of, and fallback-reboot is all that's left to try, short of hoofing over to the machine or calling someone on the phone..
  • fallback-reboot currently only supports Linux, Solaris, AIX, and FreeBSD but adding support for other operating systems would most likely be fairly trivial as long as you have an mlockall function or something similar, and you can figure out how to get your system to reboot without syncing or exec'ing.


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