I'm a little curious as to under exactly what circumstances a reboot is actually necessary. I know a reboot is necessary to load a new kernel and that the power inside the box must be off to install or remove internal hardware --- are there any other times when a reboot is not optional?
For example, you can plug and unplug an idle printer without any difficulty. I've heard that if you shut down gpm and X and any other rodent-listening programs you can also change the mouse without any problems. I'm guessing there's a way to do this with the keyboard or the monitor, if maybe you could remotely shut down the console or something. I think you can do an "init 1" to get into single-user and do single-user things without losing uptime, even repartition a disk if you're brave. (I might try this in a couple of weeks and thought it would be a cool thing to tell my winfriends (and also my unixfriends) that I did without rebooting.) I don't intend to try all of these things (I like my peripherals, thanks). I'm just curious: when is a hardware reboot absolutely unavoidable? Rob -- Eat right, stay fit, and die anyway.
