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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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I'm a Sun admin by day, and Sun has always (since at least SunOS 4.1, when I started) made provisions to do this. I'll admit that I'm rarely cutting-edge with my Linux systems, so I haven't had any panics that I wanted to track down, so I don't know if Linux does this sort of stuff for you. I'm shocked that OpenBSD doesn't.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
This is most likely a hardware failure, possibly memory. Try memtest86 before you go on a kernel debugging hunt... basically, if your server has worked great for 12 months and then craps like this it probably ain't software.
Today the faulty or poorly supported hardware is much more likely reason for a crash. I have quite a few K6-2 and K6-3 boxes around, and they die like flies, after 1 or 2 years of continuous use; most often the motherboard fails. I had a Linux box that crashed once in 2 weeks; I moved the HDDs into another computer, moved most of cards and it now averages 150 days of uptime, interrupted only by power outages (no UPS there). Another K6-3 box sometimes fails in BIOS, during memory test in POST routine! I gave up on this one; it is not worth of my time. Needless to say, this box had all sorts of weird crashes in all OSes that I ran on it; NetBSD didn't even boot from the boot floppy, mumbling something about "garbage IDE DMA" :-)