"(Ted Harding)" wrote:
>
> On 22-Apr-99 Razvan Cristian Oprea wrote:>
> >
> > I've just had a most terrifying experience. Trying to open an Ms Excel
> > document with Staroffice 5.0 under KDE (SuSE 6.0), my computer, rock
> > stable before, got frozen. Ms Windows frozen like I mean... The only
> > think he could recognize was the reset button. I thought it was an
> > accident. So after the cold reboot, I tried again with the same
> > document. The same thing happened: a message from Staroffice, telling
> > me that an error has occured and that my documents have been saved.
> > After that, only silence.
> > [snip]
> > Staroffice is hence really dangerous considering the type of
> > access he has to my computer's resources! How is it all this possible??
>
> This looks as though it may not be so much StarOffice freezing the whole
> system, as freezing X.
>
> This can also happen with some other applications.[1] When it happens,
> mouse and keyboard input to X is impossible, so you can't even switch to
> a text console. Nevertheless, the system itself is working, and provided
> you have some way to communicate with it which bypasses X you can close
> down the running applications and X, and start them again, without having
> to even re-boot let alone press the reset button.
>
> Even a serial-port connection to another computer (ancient UNIX style,
> and the other computer could be that CP/M museum piece in the back room)
> is enough in this case: just log in from the other computer, become root,
> and clean up. Naturally, network connection also works.
>
> Of course it may be that you really have frozen the whole system and
> nothing whatever will rescue you ... but I think you should try the option
> above before coming to that conclusion.
I know this isn't very feasible for most, but you can telnet into the
machine and kill all that stuff that's freezing the system. This is
what I do. Another alternative is to pick up an old serial based dumd
terminial and have that working off your machine. I like this because I
can direct the console to it and watch what's going on.
--
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Was there no communication in this car. Had we deteriorated to
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