[lug] When to try rebooting Linux

[Daniel Webb]

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?