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I just hate to reboot remote machines. That’s part of the reason this took so long, the box locked up and couldn’t get the machine back into multi-user after a remote power cycle, requiring a 2.5 hour leisurely drive in the middle of the night to give a warm hug to my sick init process. Need to investigate remote consoles.

Need to investigate remote consoles.

No you don't. Trust me.

We don't have them at my unnamed place of employment for a REASON. UNLESS you employ a Citrix solution. Then, maybe, but we employ another two layers of security beyond just ID/PW, just to be triple sure.

Even then, we are abandoning even three-layer info-based security and going to a PIV card. Gotta have the card or no-way-Jose, and this is using CITRIX.

It pays to be a paranoid conspiracy freak in our field.

I just hate to reboot remote machines. That’s part of the reason this took so long, the box locked up and couldn’t get the machine back into multi-user after a remote power cycle, requiring a 2.5 hour leisurely drive in the middle of the night to give a warm hug to my sick init process. Need to investigate remote consoles.

You might enjoy this story about 'remote machines' John ...

Back in the late 80's, I found myself working at an FM radio station in North Florida, wearing several different hats, news director, morning show host, Sat nite oldies host, etc., and our station had applied to the FCC for 24 hour operation (prior to that we signed off at Midnight) and when we were granted the 24/7 extended hours, my boss sadly realized that he couldn't afford an extra person to sit on the control board from Midnight to 6, and that is when I suggested to him that we just record 6 hours of programming on the audio track of a VCR tape, and run the VCR after Midnight until the morning crew (me and my co-host) came in at 5:00 am.

My boss was ecstatic at the idea, in fact he went out and bought a Hitachi (?) VCR which was not belt driven like most VCR's of the day, but gear driven which meant no distortion on the lower extended play/record speed.

So everything is great UNTIL our illustrious engineer informed us that we couldn't leave the station totally unattended UNLESS we were able to remotely control the transmitter to shut it off if necessary per FCC requirements. And the remote control equipment was prohibitively expensive. My boss went from ecstatic to enraged.

At the risk of this sounding like I'm tooting my own horn, I spent some time with the engineer (who was like a dutch Uncle to me anyway), and we found a cheap solution:

In the transmitter shack about 100 yards from the main building, we had a standard touch tone telephone, and we replaced it with a speaker phone that had a feature for "automatic pickup" for incoming calls. We tested it, and sure enough, we could call the phone and it would answer and we heard the humming of the transmitter (and not much else).

Then we installed a popular consumer product of that era between the AC power coming into the shack and the transmitter itself.

Behold, the 'CLAPPER' (Clap on! Clap off! The Clapper!), and by God it worked: we called the speakerphone, we clapped our hands over the mouth piece on our phone, and the damn transmitter shut down perfectly.

My reward? I got a .50 cent per hour increase in wages.

BFD (as Joe Biden would say) LOL