[stewartm]

Yep.

3AM, deep slumber, called out to look at a stricken server. Its problems included that systemd was frozen. Reluctantly I came to the conclusion that a restart was the only route forward. Cept, that is when you discover that the commands that have served you well for 2 decades don't work, as they are all wrappers for systemd, which has keeled over.

To this day, the `shutdown` man page, which I was checking in, makes no mention of how to resolve, tho in fairness the other commands (poweroff, halt, init) do. I discovered this after stumbling across https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3282

If you find yourself stuck in the middle of the night, reading through docs to try and figure out how recover a machine with a crashed systemd, then `systemctl reboot -ff` or equivalent is what you are now looking for, the `-ff` being the key to "JUST £&*(ing RESTART THE MACHINE!!!".

Experiences like that, don't win you friends.

[setquk]

The worst thing about this is when stuff goes down, it does so at the least convenient time. Back in 2003 I was on a customer site who had a RH server and there was no internet connection available (as it was routed through the box) and my phone was a Treo 180G which had precisely fuck all useful internet on it. The company still exists and is in the middle of nowhere on the end of a shonky ADSL line and no mobile phone reception so the story hasn't improved.

If this happened to me today with systemd I'd be up shit creek without a paddle.

[Twirrim]

Did raising elephants not work (SysRq + R E I S U B)

[auscompgeek]

systemd disables the magic sysrq keys by default.