systemd depends so heavily on a files it can not reboot

[Adam Pribyl]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2013, John Morris wrote:

> On Wed, 2013-07-10 at 14:09 +0200, Karel Volný wrote:
>> Dne středa, 10. července 2013 5:13:22 CEST, John Morris  napsal(a):
>> ...
>>> But then I remembered that if things have really went wrong you could boot
>>> with init=/usr/bin/bash.
>>
>> how do these advices help when the system is already so broken that it cannot reboot without help of sysrq or ctrl+alt+del combo?
>
> If it is a remote system you really should look into IPMI.  If the
> system is really broken you really can't depend on ctrl-alt-del, SysRq
> or anything else to remaining working.  Tell IPMI to toggle reset and
> hope the bootloader is still working, if it isn't repeat and boot rescue
> media from CD/USB, etc.

All right, this is a next step - hard reset or power interruption.

Normally what you do is (with increasing possibility of damage caused by 
reboot):
1. try to login remotely and find what is going on -> reboot if necessary
2. try to login localy and find what is going on -> reboot if necessary
3. try to reboot localy if login is not possible
4. hard reset the machine if login and reboots are not possible

now what I experience is:
1. I could not login remotely (ssh was segfaultin, dono whyg)
2. I could not login localy, login just accepted my credentials and 
printed the login prompt again (systemd @getty was broken, could not be 
started)
3. I could not reboot localy (system @ctrl-alt-del was broken), system was 
running but absolutely no reaction to ctrl-alt-del 
4. I only could do hard reset (IMPI, button, remote UPS whatever)

In my opinion systemd should not ignore the option 3 completely. The 
keyboard input should at least attempt to 
TERM->KILL->sync->mount ro->halt. ATM if it has no ctrl-alt-del.target 
file it does nothing, just sits there leaving the system fully running, 
even thou local soft reset was requested and systemd knows that.

Adam Pribyl