[TriLUG] 'reboot' doesn't

[Alan Porter]

Last week, $WORK bought three PC's from our friends
at Intrex.  They have Intel Celeron 326 (2.5GHz
Celeron D) processors on Via PM8M2-V motherboards
(Via P4M800 + VT8237 chipset).  <-- That sentence
does not mean anything to me, but maybe it does to
you?

We installed Debian Stable on all three of them, and
everything seems to run OK.  But they don't reboot!
When I type 'reboot', they go through the normal
shutdown procedure, and the last thing I see on the
monitor is:

   Rebooting...
   Synchronizing SCSI cache for disk sdb:
   Synchronizing SCSI cache for disk sda:
   Restarting system.

But it stops there... it does not actually reboot.

Some miscellaneous factoids:
 - All of this is with the keyboard unplugged.
 - There is a setting in the BIOS to change the "ACPI
   standby state" to either S3(STR) or S1(POS).
 - I *have* seen it reboot once or twice, with the
   keyboard plugged in and the BIOS set to S3 (I think,
   I am trying lots of combinations today).
 - I tried "reboot=c", "reboot=h", "reboot="w", and
   "reboot=b" on the kernel command line.
 - "shutdown" seems to work just fine.
 - I did call Intrex, and they suggested fiddling with
   the S1/S3 setting, but admitted that they did not
   know a lot about Linux.
 - I tried disabling ACPI altogether in hopes that APM
   would take over.

I would like to leave these in a room with no keyboard
or monitor attached.

Any ideas how I can get these little buggers to reboot
(without running to $REMOTE_LOCATION and pressing the
reset button)???


Alan