Forcing a reboot

After messing with my remote server, there came a time for a reboot. Simple enough - but this time it ended in error.

Call to Reboot failed: Connection timed out

I’ve been using Linux servers for decades now and I was never faced with this issue. Fortunately, somebody at Unix StackExchange did.

Solution was to manually enter a few letters into /proc/sysrq-trigger, one letter at a time.

echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger ; echo u > /proc/sysrq-trigger ; echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

This (attempts to) execute three distinct commands:

• s: syncs all file systems
• u: makes all file systems read-only
• b: reboots the system in agressive manner.

If you are curious about what other things you can do, kernel.org has a nice documentation page.