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Preparing for the Worst in FreeBSD

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the when-it-rains-it-pours dept.

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."

9 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. My experiences with Windows XP Professional by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I am a Computer Information Systems Professional at a major Fortune 500 corporation. Very recently the head of our IT department decided that we were going to switch every one of our networks over to Windows XP Professional. We had previously been running OpenBSD on all our quad processor Xeons. Some of them had had uptimes approaching a year! My personal favourite, Gerbil, had been running without a reboot for three years.

    One day one of those Microsoft shills that you often read about on the Register came by for a visit. I grew very suspicious about what was going on when my boss and the Microsoft representative walked by my desk, and entered the server room. I could hear muffled voices through the closed door. The Microsoft representative was asking what we were running on our servers! My worst fears had come true. I sat at my desk for the rest of the day, silently awaiting the bad news. The news did not come until the next day. It was worse than I had feared. We were to be a Microsoft only shop from that day on! I could not believe it. The Microsoft representative had told my boss that the operating and support costs would actually go down. And my boss had fully bought into it, hook, line, and sinker.

    Tough times hit our company in the last month, and we were forced to lay off a few of the less experienced IS/IT workers. One of them took this rather hard. As a last minute attempt at corporate sabotage, he decided to change all of the Computer Administrator passwords on a few of the XP Professional boxes sitting around in the server room. This caused absolute havoc, as Dell had failed to send along administrator passwords for the new boxes. Our company could not make use of these computers for three days. It took Dell that long to get us the administrator passwords. It is strictly because of Microsoft's poor implementation of a multi-user computing environment that our company lost three days of productivity.

    Needless to say, I had our quad Xeons back running OpenBSD by the end of the week. Gerbil is back on its way to another glorious 3 years of uptime.

    1. Re:My experiences with Windows XP Professional by buffy · · Score: 4, Interesting
      First some nit-picking...

      Very recently the head of our IT department decided that we were going to switch every one of our networks over to Windows XP Professional.

      Windows is an Operating System, not a network. Your network probably "runs" TCP/IP, Netbios, and a handful of other protocols. Windows runs on desktops, laptops, and servers.

      he decided to change all of the Computer Administrator passwords on a few of the XP Professional boxes sitting around in the server room. This caused absolute havoc, as Dell had failed to send along administrator passwords for the new boxes. Our company could not make use of these computers for three days. It took Dell that long to get us the administrator passwords.

      This last paragraph is a touch more concerning...first of any Windows box I've purchased from Dell, or others, have no administrator password, or are set to "admin". Why would Dell have set specific passwords for your systems? I'm just a little bit confused.

      On a related point, even for those systems that come pre-installed with an OS, it's [my] standard practice to bare-iron re-install from scratch. I'm not a huge fan of MS (quite the opposite), however, in the hands of someone who has a solid understanding in operating systems, it IS possible to build a stable Windows box. I have an NT 4 server, running a database, and a mail exchange, that has an uptime of 94 days. It was rebooted for a disk addition. It was up 86 days prior to that (it's installation date.)

      That said, I prefer and use Linux and Solaris much more frequently, and, unlike the windows example above, am not surprised by the continued uptime of my hosts! ;)

      Now, I've gotta ask...why did you just sit at your desk waiting for the bad news?? I've (and my VP) have recieved visits from MS cronies in the past. The thing is, those people are sales/marketing weenies. Get in on the meeting, and use your own skills to ask very pointed questions. Its not very difficult to run circles around these droids. Keep it calm, polite, and just bury them in the technical truths which they simply cannot refute. If they try to call you a "Linux zealot" you know you're on the right track, and they're in the process of losing their cool. As long as you keep it together, and don't let them change the topic, I've found that its pretty easy to expose others in my company to MS's shortcomings...right in front of MS folks themselves.

      If you just sit back and let non-techs make tech decisions without, at least, making them aware of the ramifications of such things, then you really can't blame them. Its kind-of what they say about voting, right? If you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain?

      Now, if you work in a super huge corporation where such things are a fact of life, I'm sorry, and you probably don't have a choice. Well...other than to extract yourself from between Mr. Rock, and Mr. Hardplace.

  2. Re:Hardware prob -- memcheck86 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Yes. I've yet to encounter a FreeBSD kernel panic that wasn't a hardware issue, two recent ones that I've had have been memory related. Now, my standard mode of operation is to put in a memcheck86 floppy and reboot before I do anything else.

  3. Re:Good question: Why *haven't* they mentioned Rot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Right on. I know plenty of people who've submitted stories about all aspects of Rotor. I've also seen a port commit in FreeBSD to build Rotor. What's more, the FreeBSD port maintainer already patch like 6 critical bugs in Microsoft's code.

    What the hell, Slashdot? Run a damn story already. Just like to the MS page, for crying out loud.

  4. Re:Nice article, but... by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is this a sun hardware feature though? I mean the other day (after months and months of uptime) I had a kernel panic on the machine (11 year old SS10 running debian linux) that is eventually going to route this submit.

    Long story short I couldn't log in, but if I went to the console I could see the kernel messages (logged) and if I hit enter it popped back to the login prompt (didn't work though). Funny thing is it was still routing traffic and looking up dns names - despite the fact I couldn't log in or access the console. I eventually hit stop-a (full break for those of use without a keyboard/monitor) and reset the machine.

  5. Explanation of the double-ram swap rule by SpaFF · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "To prepare for a kernel panic, you need the system source code installed. You need one (or more) swap partition that is at least one MB larger than your physical memory and preferably twice as large as your RAM. If you have 512MB of RAM, for example, you need a swap partition that is 513MB or larger, with 1024MB being preferable."


    I've never been able to get a straight answer as to why the swap rule of thumb is double the ram. I guess that explains it, although since Linux puts the backtrace to the console and syslog maybe there is another reason as well...

    --
    -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
  6. Re:Good question: Why *haven't* they mentioned Rot by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Okay, I'll bite. What "cool technologies" does MS provide?

    ".NET allows developers to build very powerful solutions around web services much more quickly". So what about perl and java? What are they?

    7x performance? Bullshit. Yes, Java isn't fast, but the limiting factor with modern, good VMs (like IBM's) is *not* the CPU but the fact that it eats RAM like there's no tomorrow. Java generally runs more than 1/7 the speed of a compiled C program. You are not going to convince me that MS's newcomer C# compilers run 7 times faster than Java, which would be faster than C benchmarks.

    --
    May we never see th
  7. Re:sigh by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The thing is that Linux was designed to be flexible. You want this kind of functionality?

    echo "\"xwd -out screenshot\"\n shift + alt + printscreen" -e >> ~/.xbindkeys

    And voila, you have the same functionality.

    Of course, most Linux distros don't turn on all the bells and whistles by default...you get to find 'em.

    --
    May we never see th
  8. Ummm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FreeBSD-3.5 hemsut 7:07AM up 822 days, 06:32, 2 users, load averages: 1.17, 1.15, 1.10

    What are you people complaining about?