[lug] When to try rebooting Linux

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Wednesday 01 September 2004 03:44 pm, Daniel Webb wrote:
> Normally rebooting Linux does not fix a problem, unlike Windows.  I have
> now found three circumstances where rebooting has solved problems with
> Linux:
>
> 1) SCSI emulation problems (like if you take a CD out of the drive in the
> middle of burning, and kernel freaks out).  There are usually lots of scsi
> error messages dumped either to the console or /var/syslog.
>
> 2) USB problems.  This has been pretty random, but from what I've read,
> the USB parts of Linux are poorly written.  The situation I have seen
> where rebooting helped was when /var/syslog was full of USB error messages
> (thousands of them).
>
> 3) PCMCIA wireless networking.  After doing many manipulations with
> iwconfig, sometimes everything will appear to work fine, yet network
> traffic won't go through.  There are no errors seen in /var/syslog.
>
> Any comments or situations to add?

Anything involving loading/unloading of kernel modules.  All of the above are 
covered by this one.  In particular, configuring hardware like sound cards, 
ethernet cards, scsi cards, etc.  This is even more true if the modules are 
experiment, new, or not widely used.

Michael