How to force a thread to stop

[Paul Rubin]

"Carl J. Van Arsdall" <cvanarsdall at mvista.com> writes:
> Yea, there are other free solutions you might want to check out, I've
> been looking at ganglia and nagios.  These require constant
> communication with a server, however they are customizable in that you
> can have the server take action on various events. Cheers!

There's some pretty tricky issues with desktop-class PC hardware about
what to do if you need to reconfigure or reboot one remotely.  Real
server hardware is better equipped for this but costs a lot more.

I remember something called "PC-Weasel" which was an ISA-bus plug-in
card that was basically a VGA card with an ethernet port.  That let
you see the bootup screens remotely, adjust the cmos settings, etc.  I
remember trying without success to find something like that for the
PCI bus.  Without something like that, all you can really do if a PC
in server gets wedged is remote-reset or power cycle it; even that of
course takes special hardware, but many colo places are already set up
for that.