Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
Where are the color-coded states of emergency? This is no respectable anti-panic plan.
Witness the rebirth of ENRON!
tcd004
"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." And people bash Windows for its lack of stability. I'm sorry, but an OS that can crash for seemingly no apparent reason, can barely be fixed, and requires a bunch of preparation just to prepare is too complicated for me. If I were a server admin with a few years experience with this OS and going the long way around to ensure a smooth ride, I might be more enthusiastic about the whole thing. At least with Windows based OSes all you need is a bit of veteran intuition and skill to find out what is wrong. Even if the problem isn't obvious, the solution usually is, or its easy to figure out.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
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.
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?
'Any' key? Where's the 'any' key? I see 'ke-tarl', 'esk', and 'pig-uh', but there doesn't seem to be any 'any' key!
Phew, all this computer hacking is making me thirsty.
common, give us this screen dump, we wanna see.
I know this was offtopic, but the topic sucked and I wanted to post anyway.
Aye, the topic is really, really suck so I look at his sig instead:
Michael Lucas lives in a haunted house in Detroit, Michigan with his wife Liz, assorted rodents...
I wouldn't want to read from those who married rodents!
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.
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!
its on my machine at work, at home tonight
can post it up to a website later, I will
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.
Yes I agree -it's getting to the stage with some sites where
the Hey I'm a flashing ad!
story Look at me!
you Hey over here!
want
to
read
Flash!Flash!Flash! is
so
squashed
by
ads Have I got your attention yet?
you
keep
having
to
Do you want to save money?
scroll
down
Personally I just turn pictures off when I get to a site like that.
Video Game cheats, hints a
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. ;)
I don't know why I typed "OpenBSD", I knew it was "FreeBSD", I guess that my fingers were typing ahead of my brain. Sorry if I offended anyone.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
nowhere does it say that this site is a linux site. If it had to be labeled anything it should be an opensource site, thats why you get new about linux, bsd, mac os x.
I can hardly wait to know what to do with my kernel dump
Flush it down the toilet?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
also, in gcc, the -g and -O flags aren't mutually exclusive
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Details: I just love the chicks in the blue and white dress. Especially Shannon, who works at UNATCO, and the chick who works near the entrace to the Lucky Money. "I like a man with a lot of zippers." Well unzip my pants for a big surprise, baby. Anyway, I haven't actually masturbated during the game yet, but I've thought about it.
--
"Negative One, Troll."
A golden badge of honor,
worn on my penis.
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.
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";
no ads at all. although on my windows box, I got this really useful error message:
anotherboguserror.jpg
after I wrote my new host table and disabled my DNS caching and putting in a static IP. The machine only has one NIC.
take that back, preview reveals the need to ad ssads.osdn.com for some of those slashdot ads.
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.
Better than hallmark, at least
i hate pansy republicans
Oh, of course - the ksymoops! Man, I loved how *nix makes their commands so obvious.
Let me take it apart: ksymoops = "kernel symbolic oops". In general, if something starts with a 'k' on Linux, it's either inside the kernel or some part of KDE.
For another thing, how is it obvious that a "chair" is something you sit on while in front of a desk, other than the fact that you've been using the word since you were two? As you learn Linux debugging, you pick up its special vocabulary.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"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
The article is informative and clearly written, but crashdumps are more useful for determining kernel software problems than hardware ones.
If the system is a stable release, and has been running without crashes for about a year, I'd start by running diagnonstics on the hardware - specifically, memory and disk - before trying to debug the kernel.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
Do NOT mod up people who have been blatantly trolled. This is simple common sense. The person who was trolled is a jackass for losing, but the person[s] who modded his post up is a COMPLETE FUCKING IDIOT.
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.
Wow, a well written, entertaining, somewhat original troll.
:-) Also, there was a Win2k box at work that had a sound card that NT 4 supported but Win2k and above didn't (and the company was out of business, so no future support was going to happen). Linux has and still does support the thing fine.
+1, Troll
However, because some of these points are valid, I'm going to respond.
"When my Linux machine crashed and I was unable to mount my root partition..."
In terms of troubleshooting capabilities, Linux is the best OS I've ever used. When Windows dies, all the techs I know just reinstall the thing, and if that doesn't work, wipe the drive and reinstall. There simply aren't any good diagostic tools, and if a crash happens during startup...well, how the heck are you supposed to know what caused it? If I can view and edit my initscripts, I *can* fix this. The main problem is that while you *can* fix almost any problem in Linux, it's also not necessarily easy, and you may spend a while reading up on things.
IE 5 *for Windows* is not more W3C compliant than Mozilla, and IE 6 is worse.
As for an "American OS", I wouldn't be suprised if large chunks of Windows are developed in MS's software dev branch in India, though admittedly I don't know for sure, and MS may have a keep-the-crown-jewels-at-home policy.
Windows *does* provide good game support. Better than Linux. My productivity has climed a bunch since getting rid of Windows.
As for NT and routing, my experience with trying to convince NT to handle Ethernet and a modem line at once have gotten me incredibly frusterated with Windows as a whole. The wizards are fragile (close a window when the wizard doesn't expect it and things start breaking, I reached a state where the entire networking component needed to be reinstalled or else it ignored all the numbers I was entering in to it...) Granted, the non-GUI wrapped interface to Linux routing is a little more complicated than in NT, but it's not that bad.
May we never see th
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
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
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.
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?
Intended to be funny? No, this post was actually intended to be pretty serious, with a touch of sarcasm. Naturally, because I said Windows, it got the instant -1 Flamebait in it, and people decied to mark it -3 Overrated, so its back to the usual +1. Anyway, yeah, I use Windows. I'm more of a gamer than anything, and I don't want to have to worry about whether or not the next game I buy can run on Linux. Maybe my Windows 98SE machine crashes daily, but a reboot is a small price to pay for virtual freedom in choosing software packages and little to no hassle installing them.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
...it doesnt panic. in camly states that there is some trouble, then it fixes it and makes your system run 10% faster to apologize.
four-oh-four
So MS releases some source (seeing their .NET in serious jeopardy), which could in theory be compiled on different platforms. If someone went through the herculean porting effort, do you think MS would actually let you *run* anything or *distribute* anything, without some serious licensing fees? Don't fool yourself.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Because if it is then by all means spend time doing this. Else, just spend some money on better hardware - probably memory. The cost of that hardware is probably far less then the cost of your labor.
If you need to build an insto-recovery system for a network of identical machines, that is something different. By all means create an ability to rapid rebuild a blown system and recover the last incremental backup. But otherwise don't try to make a hardware problem into a software solution.
Fact: *BSD is dead
Oh? *BSD is dead? Well, didn't you say that it was dying not dead? If you're going to be a troll, at least be a consistent one!
I'm not going to even start about your "no hardware support" comment. Why would MS favor it with .NET support? Because they use FreeBSD. It runs Hotmail.
Fact: BSD is slow and obsolete. NetBSD is slow. OpenBSD is nearly ancient.
BSD is not slow, it is extremely fast and is not obsolete nor obsolescent.
Fact: BSD is a rip-off of the MacOS.
BSD is not a rip-off of MacOS. It is, in fact, the other way around. MacOS uses BSD code, not BSD using MacOS code.
Fact: BSD is highly insecure.
You do not know what you are talking about if you say that.
As of Saturday 30 March the cli is in the ports tree at lang/cli
-xenyz
Because it was release for FreeBSD and not Linux. Most of the Linux faithful are over in the corner sulking that it wasn't release for their beloved distro/kernel of the week/self congratulatory club. :-p