On Sunday, March 29, 2015 12:23:00 PM lee wrote: > Philip Webb <purs...@ca.inter.net> writes: > What's the last time you pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del and it actually worked? > It's a legacy thing from times when freezes/crashes were common and when > it did work and was useful. > > Nowadays, when you're pressing it, usually nothing happens anyway > because the machine is down to where you have to press the reset button > or to turn off the power (if you can't log in with ssh). When the > machine still works, Ctrl+Alt+Del also works, which means that the > default does nothing but create a security hole.
On Linux now there's the Magic SysRq Key feature for that. If enabled (I think it is by default, may be wrong) you can use ctrl-alt-sysrq plus one these keys even if your kernel panics or freezes in most cases (ctrl may only be needed from xorg): r - to get the keyboard back so you can switch to VT if xorg freezes e - to terminate all processes gracefully (SIGTERM) except pid 1 i - to terminate all processes forcefully (SIGKILL) except pid 1 s - to sync all filesystems u - to unmount them and remount readonly b - to reboot Easy to remember as "Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken" There's a lot of other commands in the kernel docs sysrq.txt > So how can we have this default changed? Somebody posted that on this very thread. Replace the ctrlaltdel entry on inittab with /bin/false. -- Fernando Rodriguez
