The program dumped core because of a floating point exception (a bug
in gnuplot 3.6 beta pl261, to be exact), and the graphics screen
stayed with its last attempt at a graph. Gnuplot failed to restore
its previous graphics state (another bug in gnuplot, but some
applications will misbehave :-). I was left without any possibility
of console switching (Alt-Function keys did not work). When I
walked over to another machine to try and set things straight via
telnet, I could not get a connection. Ssh immediately closed things
down again after accepting a connection. Ping to the machine still
worked.
Since nothing else seemed to help, I hit the reset button. 1.3.63
came up cleanly, without a file system check (fsck thought that the
partitions were clean) and pretended nothing had happened. There
was no message in the system logs indicating anything. The
new recovery code seems to work well, at least partially.
-- Thomas Koenig, Thomas.Koenig@ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de, ig25@dkauni2.bitnet. The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double logarithmic diagram.