Configure Linux server hardware buttons for soft reset or power cycle?

Posted by Jakobud on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Jakobud
Published on 2011-02-14T04:50:02Z Indexed on 2011/02/14 7:26 UTC
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linux

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centos

I have a small modest CentOS server at home. I run it headless because anytime I access it, it's always via SSH.

Anyways, tonight it became unresponsive to the network. I could not connect to it to investigate. In this case, I have to hook up a keyboard and monitor to see the problem. I ended up just rebooting it.

But after this experience, I was wondering if it's possible to configure the hardware buttons on the CPU case to perform a graceful reboot or graceful power cycle in Linux. Even though the server becomes unresponsive once in a blue moon, it would be nice to simply press a button and have it shutdown all services and gracefully reboot.

Anyone know how this could be accomplished?

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