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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."

4 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. What? by tcd004 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Where are the color-coded states of emergency? This is no respectable anti-panic plan.

    Witness the rebirth of ENRON!
    tcd004

  2. Big Scary Deamons by Alien54 · · Score: 5, Informative
    It is a bit easier to read without the ads, using the printer friendly page:

    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"
  3. Who cares? by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:12 month uptime + crash = hardware failure by CoolVibe · · Score: 5, Informative
    Tell me about it... In fact, I have made a bootable CD-R with memtest86 that I can boot in servers that support cd-rom booting.

    I did it like this:

    1. Compile memtest86.
    2. make a floppy image: dd if=/dev/zero of=padding.img bs=512 count=2880
    3. append the image after the memtest.bin: cat padding.img >> memtest.bin
    4. cut the floppy image to size so mkisofs won't choke on it: dd if=memtest.bin of=bootfloppy.img bs=512 count=2880
    5. Make image with mkisofs: mkdir empty && cd empty && mkisofs -b ../bootfloppy.img -o boot.iso .
    6. Burn that image and you're done! Bootable memtest86 cd-rom. A handy tool for your toolchest.

    7. That thing saved my life countless times when dealing with old servers and spotty RAM.