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Preparing for the Worst in FreeBSD
LiquidPC writes "In Part I of this series,
Michael Lucas, from ONLamp.com, goes over preparing your FreeBSD computer for the worst in case of a system panic."
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Big_Scary_Daemons.html
Yep, that is the name of the page.
Michael Lucas lives in a haunted house in Detroit, Michigan
Maybe we could move the ghost to Seattle?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Panic 12 as described in the article is most likely a hardware fault somewhere on the mainboard. It is by far the most common cause of a panic on FreeBSD. Exchange mainboard, CPU and memory against working components and you are back up and running without the panics.
On Linux, the kernel prints the backtrace on the console, and into the syslog if it can. Later you can run ksymoops on this backtrace to match it to the symbolic names. This requires no preparation, but since I never saw FreeBSD backtraces I can't say if it is of a similar detail level.
come on, what kind of geek are you ? : ) there's always a technical solution to a social problem : ) what you need to do is go to www.smartin-designs.com/hosts_info.htm , grab a hosts file, modify it as needed, and wave bye bye to all the ads.......this works great for me, and kills a lot of spyware too.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I mean c'mon. We get tons of mentions of .NET around here, talk about how Microsoft is only into closed source, etc. Now Microsoft actually releases 1.9 million lines of source code spread among almost 10,000 files that people can compile to get .NET up and running on their FreeBSD boxes, and Slashdot suddenly clams up about it?
Who can honestly say that this isn't a story of interest to a large amount of people here, whether they hate .NET or not? There's a lot of discussion to be had about it. Comparisons to Mono/DotGnu? The licensing details? The performance? Comparisons to Java on FreeBSD? To pretend it doesn't exist is just silly and does seem to call Slashdot's motives into question.
Well, for FreeBSD users who might be interested, I'll go ahead and post a link to a few articles about it myself, from O'Reilly's site who's been doing a pretty decent job of breaking it down: http://www.oreillynet.com/dotnet/. Discuss amongst yourselves. ;)
For more info, check out the FreeBSD Release Engineering Page
Disclaimer:
Yes, there's a slight chance you might come across some new bug in the 4.x tree; however, it's unlikely.
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
I've been running two FreeBSD systems for over seven years each. I've had to do a grand total of *ONE* reboot that I can remember, aside from powering down to swap hardware, update the kernel, or to move the equipment.
It's a damn stable OS. One of these machines is a dual PII/400, serving 700-1000kbps day in day out, with hundreds of active TCP connections at any given time, starting 15-20 new processes per second. The other machine is for a single, fairly busy web site doing 700kbps traffic.
FreeBSD is rock solid. I have absolutely no need to plan for a kernel panic.
As usual, an ignorant post get moderated up, sigh. .NET article.
Here is your
It was correctly posted only to a section, since I don't think the average slashdotter will start compiling it, let alone show interest in it.
Details: "BSD" has existed for almost twenty years. Today's BSD software -- BSDi, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X -- are derived from 4.4BSD-lite, the last public release from Berkeley CSRG. What is CSRG, you ask? Well, UNIX was originally developed at Bell Labs (AT&T), and AT&T released the source (sound familiar?) to academic and research institutions in the late seventies/early eighties. These groups did a lot to improve UNIX, but none did more than the Computer Systems Research Group ar Berkeley. They created the primary non-AT&T variant of UNIX, called BSD (Berkeley System Distribution). BSD played a huge part in the early years of the Web -- DARPA, the government agency whose ARPAnet was the precursor of the WWW, contracted CSRG to add TCP/IP support to BSD. BSD was the first OS to have integrated TCP/IP, actually -- it was the original Internet platform. BSD had a good number of other innovations as well, and the CSRG freaks added many loved/hated things to UNIX culture (such as Bill Joy's C shell and vi), but none is as significant IMNSHO as TCP/IP.
The CSRG was winding down in the late eighties, after DARPA funding dried up. They were going to call it quits, and decided to release the BSD source to the public. Well, there was still some AT&T code in there, so AT&T had a hissy fit and sued. Bottom line: CSRG removed the AT&T code., and "4.4BSD-lite" was released in 1994 IIRC, and it was that same year (IIRC) that Free- and NetBSD started becoming popular. This is 2002, so it is very possible that the poster has been using FreeBSD for eight years, and if he's referring to BSD as an OS family, it's quite obvious that he could have been using it for eight years.
Just because you're a clueless newbie doesn't mean that everyone else is!
Continuing my history of BSD... OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD, created when Theo the Rat^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hde Raadt became enraged when fellow NetBSD developers would not give him the title of "Grand NetBSD Master of the World" and allow him to appear naked on the cover of NetBSD CDs. OpenBSD claims to be ultra-secure because Theo has personally read every line of code, but in truth it's really sort of amateurish and its "amazing" history of few exploits is due to the fact that its userbase is like five people, including Theo's dead mother and his dog Farmer, whom he has hot dog sex with.
BSDi, a company whose board included several original CSRG members, produced a 4.4BSD-based OS called BSD/OS (creative, eh?). This OS was used by many ISPs and webhosts, but the company is gone now. BSDi had bought Walnut Creek, FreeBSD's primary supporter and distributor, last year, but BSDi is now owned by Wind River, a small loser company that doesn't seem to know what the fuck to do with BSD/OS. (They don't even put their prices on the website. I emailed and asked. I was returned a Word document with a price list. A Word document! I mean, sure I use NT as my primary workstation platform, but they're not going to sell anything to the BSD nazis by writing a price list in MS Word!) I'm honestly not sure what the status or future of FreeBSD is at this point, but going to FreeBSDMall.com and buying some daemon crap certainly won't hurt.
SunOS, the kernel of what is today called "Solaris," was once BSD. Many choose to exclude this from their histories, but you cannot change the fact that SunOS was once the most popular BSD OS. (You do know that famed BSD hacker and possibly homosexual Bill Joy is Sun's Chief Scientist, right?) In a controversial move, Sun moved to a Sys V kernel in the late eighties, to help show solidarity with AT&T's goals of standardizing the many UNIX variants. AT&T soon stopped caring, and ownership of UNIX moved from Bell to Novell and then to SCO (just about bankrupt, eh?).
Today, UNIX branding is controlled by the Open Group, the official publisher of the UNIX specs and certifier of UNIX operating systems. It's because GNU/Linux doesn't pass the OG's tests that it cannot be called real UNIX. Real UNIX operating systems include Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Tru64/Digital, and UnixWare. Notice anything missing? That's right, BSD is not a real UNIX! UNIX specifies a SysV system, and since BSD-lite doesn't include any original AT&T code, no modern BSD has any ties to real UNIX. Nevertheless, this is a very hazy area from a legal standpoint, so the OG seems to have no problem in letting BSD users call their systems "UNIX." (Note the absence of any trademark/copyright marks.)
But back to BSD! The only other BSD system worth mentioning is Mac OS X. Mac OS X is really sort of a bastard, having a lot of fucked up Apple and Mach shit mixed in with its FreeBSD roots. System-level development is different than normal BSD system development. However, because it's similar from a userland perspective, you can call it Unix, I guess. If Apple is to be believed, Mac OS X has made "Unix" a major player in the desktop market. (And if you want to really think about that, and all of the Microsoft software that runs natively on OS X, it will weird you out!)
Today, *BSD truly is dying. I'm sorry, but it is. The market is fueled by business users' money, and business users often require specific applications, applications which only NT, UNIX, and GNU/Linux can provide. BSD will remain a nice platform to run Apache, but you're not going to see FreeBSD be a targey platform for many business projects. (Note: Sony Japan runs their website on FreeBSD, but that case can be safely ignored because they're crazy Japanese and can be counted on to rice-up even the best of computer systems.) FreeBSD developes have noticed this, and most have chosen to spend their time working on GNU/Linux -- which, while equally lame, at least looks better on a resume than BSD. (PHB: "FreeBSD? What's that? Oh, you've used Linux too! I read about that last year in PHB Monthly, the PHB's guide to buzzwords and trends!")
I hope that this post has been Interesting and Informative (hint, hint).
--
"Negative One, Troll."
A golden badge of honor,
worn on my penis.
I did it like this:
That thing saved my life countless times when dealing with old servers and spotty RAM.
Hope that helped you all out a bit :)
A very long time ago (Think: SunOS 4.x), you had to have more swap than RAM because the amount of virtual memory you had was EQUAL to the amount of swapspace you had. That is, every page of RAM had to be backed by a page of swap, or else it wouldn't end up being useful (I'm oversimplifying a bit).
Now, in order for FreeBSD to be willing to save a core image, you have to have a swap partition with more space than you have in RAM, otherwise savecore will refuse to set things up. But for FreeBSD, the amount of virtual memory you have is equal to the amount of RAM you have PLUS the amount of swap space you've got set up (again, there is some RAM that gets used to hold the kernel image, so this is a bit of a simplification). Given that, it is perfectly ok to run a machine without any swap at all, provided you have a sufficient amount of memory to do everything you want to do. But having swap is good because it gives you some cushion, plus if you want to save cores from panics, you must, as I said, configure a swap partition with at least as much space as you have RAM.