Is there known problem with USB flash readers?
Hi Guys! I have a strange problem with my flash card reader when dd'ing NanoBSD images onto a CF card. It works for some time (3-4 writes of images), then I start getting scsi error messages and dd hangs. I have to disconnect/re-connect the reader to be able to write to CF again, but sometimes even this trick doesn't work. One day it stopped working for me and since I had a deadline to meet, went to local shop and bought another one (different model and brand). It worked fine for few write iterations and then it developed the same problem. When I decided (out of desperation) to try the old one again, it worked. So, I ended up using the two and swapping between it when either of the units stopped working. First thing I though that it might be the size of the image (2 or 4GB) that I was writing with dd and it was heating up the electronics, but yesterday a friend of mine stumbled upon the same problem and when his flash reader (different brand and model to mine) stopped working, he unplugged it from the FreeBSD box, plugged it in into his Linux laptop and it worked without a problem. In his view it laid to rest my theory about components heating too much as he did it without giving it a minute of rest. I vaguely recall there were problems with USB support in stable some time ago, but I thought it was all fixed and searching the list and the Internet doesn't give me anything. Both of us were using 7-stable. I can email model of the card readers later (not home at the moment). Basically, I have two questions: 1) is it something that well known and not model related 2) is there a well known reliable model of card reader I can buy. I don't mind the price if the device is rock solid. Any pointers/ideas are greatly appreciated! Regards, Alex. -- Openness is the foundation and preservative of friendship... Let me claim from you at all times your undisguised opinions. --- William Wilberforce PGP fingerprint: B030 9111 CE41 5C09 2710 E9E6 3120 F406 197B DA8E ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: panic during boot on 8.0-RELEASE
On 06/22/2010 19:42, Nicholas Mills wrote: Oops, sent this to the wrong list. --Nick -- Forwarded message -- From: Nicholas Mills nlmi...@g.clemson.edu Date: Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 7:41 PM Subject: panic during boot on 8.0-RELEASE To: freebsd-curr...@freebsd.org Hey all, Screenshot of panic message is attached. Machine is a VM running under Parallels Server Bare Metal 4. The cdrom device was enabled but not connected during boot. System was attempting to boot into single user mode. This occurred after a fresh install of 8.0-RELEASE. Let me know how I can provide more useful info. Upload the image somewhere else and provide a link to that. 8.1-RELEASE is coming at some point. You might want to try RC1 snapshots here: http://bit.ly/b7K6fI Good Luck, -- jhell ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 7.2-RELEASE-p4, IO errors RAID1 failure
On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 20:04 +0100, Bob Bishop wrote: Hi, On 22 Jun 2010, at 08:45, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 10:33:12PM +0100, Matthew Lear wrote: [tale of woe elided] I don't really have any other thoughts on the matter, sadly. [helpful suggestions elided] Anyone else have ideas/recommendations? The disks sure look OK. I wouldn't rule out the controller(s), I've had various chipsets fail in odd ways. Thanks Bob. I think we all thought the same. I've actually just rebooted the machine and FreeBSD no longer boots. This isn't what I was expecting at all. Something has clearly gone wrong with some file system metadata. When I commissioned the machine I installed an 'early' bootloader (apologies for perhaps using an incorrect term) which boots FreeBSD by default (F1 option) or from Drive 1 (F5). Drive 1 is the DVD drive. It appears to be the case that the early bootloader tries to boot FreeBSD and fails. I get the messages: error 1 lba 795079 Invalid format FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: error 1 lba 786815 No /boot/kernel/kernel FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: ...and I'm at a boot prompt. So, given that ad0 was the failed disk, the bootloader has failed to find specific boot data on ad0 and dropped me into a boot prompt. I'm tempted to replace the boot line with 0:ad(2,a)/boot/kernel/kernel or should that be 2:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel but I'm a little suspicious of doing anything at this point? Can anybody offer any guidance of what I can do to restore my system? I was able to shut down the machine cleanly (shutdown -p now) and despite the RAID mirror going offline, everything seemed to be behaving normally (expected I guess given that I just lost some redundancy). I'm just that little bit more worried now :-( If the disks are ok, what on earth could have happened and more importantly, how can I restore what was an operational system when I shut it down?! Puzzled -- Matt ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
iSCSI boot driver version 0.1.1 for iBFT
Hello, I made small device driver for the first time. It is published on my blog. Because it is written in Japanese, I try to write here. This module provides initial connection of the iSCSI target with setting via iBFT (iSCSI Boot Firmware Table). Currently, it is intended to use Intel NIC and istgt (iSCSI target). Any other cards, targets may not work. Also, I'm developing under FreeBSD 7.3. (build check under 8.1) Please refer to Microsoft website about iBFT: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/ibft.mspx I did't use iscsi_initiator.ko within kernel module. So, I'm creating a small version of initiator based on iscsi-2.2.4 and istgt-20100606. Now it have only one cmd holding space in the iSCSI session and use polling. It should be added the queuing/asynchronous operation :) After loading it via /boot/loader.conf, you can install to/boot from the iSCSI target as same as a local SCSI harddisk. Complex settings such as TFTP, NFS, DHCP and PXE are no longer needed. Just use /dev/da0 and so on. How to compile: isboot is a stand alone iSCSI initiator, but source code is depend on the header file of iscsi-2.2.4. You need to extract iscsi-2.2.4 before compiling isboot. # cd /usr/src # tar xvf /path/to/iscsi-2.2.4.tar.gz # tar xvf /path/to/isboot-0.1.1.tar.gz # make buildkernel # make installkernel or # cd /usr/src/sys/modules/iscsi/isboot # make obj # make depend # make all # make install After above install, you have /boot/kernel/isboot.ko. Using as module: Add isboot_load=YES to /boot/loader.conf. Setup iSCSI target. (recommend istgt-20100407 or later) Configure NIC BIOS to connect the target. Try to boot the server. If the NIC find the target, iBFT can be found by isboot. Then, isboot create own bus for CAM device with iBFT parameters. All LUNs in the target are appeared in the bus. Once FreeBSD + isboot is booted, you can handle it by camcontrol and other normal way as same as SCSI HDD. If you want full install and boot demo, please download FreeNAS 0.7.2 5226 p4 from my blog and try it without local harddisk. FYI: FreeNAS 0.7.1 5127 (stable) includes istgt-20100407. FYI: FreeNAS 0.7.2 5226 p3 includes istgt-20100606. FYI: FreeNAS 0.7.2 5226 p4 includes istgt-20100606 + isboot-0.1.1. sysctl MIBs (read only): net.isboot.version net.isboot.nic net.isboot.device hw.ibft.nic_gateway hw.ibft.nic_prefix hw.ibft.target_lun hw.ibft.target_port hw.ibft.target_address hw.ibft.target_name hw.ibft.initiator_address hw.ibft.initiator_name Performance (read from the target): All using Intel PRO/1000 PT Server Adapter. istgt 20100606 + isboot 0.1 with header/data digest(CRC32C): # dd if=/dev/da6 of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1k 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 20.452429 secs (52499477 bytes/sec) istgt 20100606 + isboot 0.1 with header digest: # dd if=/dev/da6 of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1k 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 17.684945 secs (60715022 bytes/sec) istgt 20100606 + isboot 0.1 without digest: # dd if=/dev/da6 of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1k 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 17.508400 secs (61327239 bytes/sec) Notes/Known Issues/Limitations: bootup/reconnect time might be a little long. ifconfig(8),route(8),etc should not change booted NIC and critical path. Unload the module will cause to panic. IPv6 is not tested. DNS is not configured. Queuing is not supported at this time. CHAP is not supported at this time. Can't configure iSCSI parameter without modifing soure code. Can't reject running XPT command when the socket is lost. Can't exchange the session to iscsi_initiator.ko. The source code depend on iscsi initiator's structure. (first I tried to use it, but finally gave up) The controller such as iscontrol(8) is not provided. Documentation is not written. I'm new to the kernel land. If you have any suggestion, please tell me. Download here (the page is Japanese only): isboot-0.1.1 http://shell.peach.ne.jp/aoyama/archives/1179 FreeNAS 0.7.2 5226 p4 http://shell.peach.ne.jp/aoyama/archives/1181 FYI: danny's iscsi initiator: ftp://ftp.cs.huji.ac.il/users/danny/freebsd/iscsi-2.2.4.tar.gz Regards, Daisuke Aoyama ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 7.2-RELEASE-p4, IO errors RAID1 failure
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 06:52:14PM +0100, Matthew Lear wrote: On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 20:04 +0100, Bob Bishop wrote: Hi, On 22 Jun 2010, at 08:45, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 10:33:12PM +0100, Matthew Lear wrote: [tale of woe elided] I don't really have any other thoughts on the matter, sadly. [helpful suggestions elided] Anyone else have ideas/recommendations? The disks sure look OK. I wouldn't rule out the controller(s), I've had various chipsets fail in odd ways. Thanks Bob. I think we all thought the same. I've actually just rebooted the machine and FreeBSD no longer boots. This isn't what I was expecting at all. Something has clearly gone wrong with some file system metadata. When I commissioned the machine I installed an 'early' bootloader (apologies for perhaps using an incorrect term) which boots FreeBSD by default (F1 option) or from Drive 1 (F5). Drive 1 is the DVD drive. I believe this is the boot0 stage of the FreeBSD bootstrap process, otherwise known as BootMgr during the OS installation. I tend to avoid this and pick Standard instead, which lets the system boot right into boot2/loader. It appears to be the case that the early bootloader tries to boot FreeBSD and fails. I get the messages: error 1 lba 795079 Invalid format FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: error 1 lba 786815 No /boot/kernel/kernel FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: ...and I'm at a boot prompt. You're at the boot0 stage. The bootstrap stage looks wrong: this should be 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader, not /boot/kernel/kernel. You should load the kernel from boot2/loader, not boot0. After you powered off the system, did you physically remove the ad0 disk, or is it still in the system? I would recommend taking ad0 out of the picture (power down the machine and physically unplug it), and make sure your BIOS is set to boot from the first hard disk *and* the 2nd hard disk. Hard disk in this context means any disk that's part of the RAID-1 array. You want to make sure your other disks (whatever that thing is on ata0-slave, and the backup disk you have on ad1) *are not* bootable from the BIOS. If they've ever been used as bootable disks in the past, then you should have cleared the MBR on them to ensure they couldn't be booted by the BIOS. What I'm documenting here is the need to make sure that you don't boot the wrong device/disk. I'm talking about what the *BIOS* boots, not the FreeBSD boot0 bootstrap. You should keep the 2nd disk in the RAID-1 mirror connected to its current SATA port; do not move it to what ad0 was connected to. So, given that ad0 was the failed disk, the bootloader has failed to find specific boot data on ad0 and dropped me into a boot prompt. Actually, it's reporting an I/O error at a specific LBA, indicating it either can't load the kernel. I'm tempted to replace the boot line with 0:ad(2,a)/boot/kernel/kernel or should that be 2:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel but I'm a little suspicious of doing anything at this point? I believe you want 0:ad(2,a)/boot/loader, but you'll have to enter this every time unless you follow what I wrote above (re: BIOS disk boot order). Can anybody offer any guidance of what I can do to restore my system? I was able to shut down the machine cleanly (shutdown -p now) and despite the RAID mirror going offline, everything seemed to be behaving normally (expected I guess given that I just lost some redundancy). I'm just that little bit more worried now :-( If the disks are ok, what on earth could have happened and more importantly, how can I restore what was an operational system when I shut it down?! At this point you need to make a judgement call: which are you going to spend more time doing: a) futzing around with this weird situation, or b) reinstalling everything and restoring data from backups? If I was in your shoes at this point, I'd probably choose (b) and go with installing 8.1-RC1 using gmirror for the RAID-1 capability. There isn't much else I can say about the issue, other than that proper failure testing may have caught this before it was too late. If there's anything positive to take away from this experience, it's that. :-) -- | Jeremy Chadwick j...@parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 7.2-RELEASE-p4, IO errors RAID1 failure
On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 11:15 -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 06:52:14PM +0100, Matthew Lear wrote: On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 20:04 +0100, Bob Bishop wrote: Hi, On 22 Jun 2010, at 08:45, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 10:33:12PM +0100, Matthew Lear wrote: [tale of woe elided] I don't really have any other thoughts on the matter, sadly. [helpful suggestions elided] Anyone else have ideas/recommendations? The disks sure look OK. I wouldn't rule out the controller(s), I've had various chipsets fail in odd ways. Thanks Bob. I think we all thought the same. I've actually just rebooted the machine and FreeBSD no longer boots. This isn't what I was expecting at all. Something has clearly gone wrong with some file system metadata. When I commissioned the machine I installed an 'early' bootloader (apologies for perhaps using an incorrect term) which boots FreeBSD by default (F1 option) or from Drive 1 (F5). Drive 1 is the DVD drive. I believe this is the boot0 stage of the FreeBSD bootstrap process, otherwise known as BootMgr during the OS installation. I tend to avoid this and pick Standard instead, which lets the system boot right into boot2/loader. It appears to be the case that the early bootloader tries to boot FreeBSD and fails. I get the messages: error 1 lba 795079 Invalid format FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: error 1 lba 786815 No /boot/kernel/kernel FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: ...and I'm at a boot prompt. You're at the boot0 stage. The bootstrap stage looks wrong: this should be 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader, not /boot/kernel/kernel. You should load the kernel from boot2/loader, not boot0. After you powered off the system, did you physically remove the ad0 disk, or is it still in the system? It's still in the system. Given that the disk is ok relative to SMART, I was of the [probably naive] assumption that I'd be able to boot up normally, access the array on ar0, re-sync the array and carry on as normal monitoring any further errors. I would recommend taking ad0 out of the picture (power down the machine and physically unplug it), and make sure your BIOS is set to boot from the first hard disk *and* the 2nd hard disk. Hard disk in this context means any disk that's part of the RAID-1 array. You want to make sure your other disks (whatever that thing is on ata0-slave, and the backup disk you have on ad1) *are not* bootable from the BIOS. If they've ever been used as bootable disks in the past, then you should have cleared the MBR on them to ensure they couldn't be booted by the BIOS. Understood. What I'm documenting here is the need to make sure that you don't boot the wrong device/disk. I'm talking about what the *BIOS* boots, not the FreeBSD boot0 bootstrap. You should keep the 2nd disk in the RAID-1 mirror connected to its current SATA port; do not move it to what ad0 was connected to. So, given that ad0 was the failed disk, the bootloader has failed to find specific boot data on ad0 and dropped me into a boot prompt. Actually, it's reporting an I/O error at a specific LBA, indicating it either can't load the kernel. I'm tempted to replace the boot line with 0:ad(2,a)/boot/kernel/kernel or should that be 2:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel but I'm a little suspicious of doing anything at this point? I believe you want 0:ad(2,a)/boot/loader, but you'll have to enter this every time unless you follow what I wrote above (re: BIOS disk boot order). Again, all understood. I gave this a whirl and saw several ad0 timeout messages at various LBA, the system boot up hung and dropped me into single user mode. atacontrol list showed no devices attached to channel 0 which I thought was rather odd. I've no idea if this is indicative of a hw failure or not. Further investigation is required. Can anybody offer any guidance of what I can do to restore my system? I was able to shut down the machine cleanly (shutdown -p now) and despite the RAID mirror going offline, everything seemed to be behaving normally (expected I guess given that I just lost some redundancy). I'm just that little bit more worried now :-( If the disks are ok, what on earth could have happened and more importantly, how can I restore what was an operational system when I shut it down?! At this point you need to make a judgement call: which are you going to spend more time doing: a) futzing around with this weird situation, or b) reinstalling everything and restoring data from backups? If I was in your shoes at this point, I'd probably choose (b) and go with installing 8.1-RC1 using gmirror for the RAID-1 capability. That's probably fair enough but I'm of the opinion that I'd like to know what has happened (or rather what FreeBSD has done) to my machine.
Re: 7.2-RELEASE-p4, IO errors RAID1 failure
Haven't followed the entire thread, but wanted to point out something important to remember. SMART is not a reliable indicator of failure. It's certainly better than listening to it but it picks up less than 1/2 of drive failures. Google released a study of their disks in data centers a few years ago that was fairly in depth look into drive failure rate. You might find it interesting. On 6/24/10, Matthew Lear m...@bubblegen.co.uk wrote: On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 11:15 -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 06:52:14PM +0100, Matthew Lear wrote: On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 20:04 +0100, Bob Bishop wrote: Hi, On 22 Jun 2010, at 08:45, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 10:33:12PM +0100, Matthew Lear wrote: [tale of woe elided] I don't really have any other thoughts on the matter, sadly. [helpful suggestions elided] Anyone else have ideas/recommendations? The disks sure look OK. I wouldn't rule out the controller(s), I've had various chipsets fail in odd ways. Thanks Bob. I think we all thought the same. I've actually just rebooted the machine and FreeBSD no longer boots. This isn't what I was expecting at all. Something has clearly gone wrong with some file system metadata. When I commissioned the machine I installed an 'early' bootloader (apologies for perhaps using an incorrect term) which boots FreeBSD by default (F1 option) or from Drive 1 (F5). Drive 1 is the DVD drive. I believe this is the boot0 stage of the FreeBSD bootstrap process, otherwise known as BootMgr during the OS installation. I tend to avoid this and pick Standard instead, which lets the system boot right into boot2/loader. It appears to be the case that the early bootloader tries to boot FreeBSD and fails. I get the messages: error 1 lba 795079 Invalid format FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: error 1 lba 786815 No /boot/kernel/kernel FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: ...and I'm at a boot prompt. You're at the boot0 stage. The bootstrap stage looks wrong: this should be 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader, not /boot/kernel/kernel. You should load the kernel from boot2/loader, not boot0. After you powered off the system, did you physically remove the ad0 disk, or is it still in the system? It's still in the system. Given that the disk is ok relative to SMART, I was of the [probably naive] assumption that I'd be able to boot up normally, access the array on ar0, re-sync the array and carry on as normal monitoring any further errors. I would recommend taking ad0 out of the picture (power down the machine and physically unplug it), and make sure your BIOS is set to boot from the first hard disk *and* the 2nd hard disk. Hard disk in this context means any disk that's part of the RAID-1 array. You want to make sure your other disks (whatever that thing is on ata0-slave, and the backup disk you have on ad1) *are not* bootable from the BIOS. If they've ever been used as bootable disks in the past, then you should have cleared the MBR on them to ensure they couldn't be booted by the BIOS. Understood. What I'm documenting here is the need to make sure that you don't boot the wrong device/disk. I'm talking about what the *BIOS* boots, not the FreeBSD boot0 bootstrap. You should keep the 2nd disk in the RAID-1 mirror connected to its current SATA port; do not move it to what ad0 was connected to. So, given that ad0 was the failed disk, the bootloader has failed to find specific boot data on ad0 and dropped me into a boot prompt. Actually, it's reporting an I/O error at a specific LBA, indicating it either can't load the kernel. I'm tempted to replace the boot line with 0:ad(2,a)/boot/kernel/kernel or should that be 2:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel but I'm a little suspicious of doing anything at this point? I believe you want 0:ad(2,a)/boot/loader, but you'll have to enter this every time unless you follow what I wrote above (re: BIOS disk boot order). Again, all understood. I gave this a whirl and saw several ad0 timeout messages at various LBA, the system boot up hung and dropped me into single user mode. atacontrol list showed no devices attached to channel 0 which I thought was rather odd. I've no idea if this is indicative of a hw failure or not. Further investigation is required. Can anybody offer any guidance of what I can do to restore my system? I was able to shut down the machine cleanly (shutdown -p now) and despite the RAID mirror going offline, everything seemed to be behaving normally (expected I guess given that I just lost some redundancy). I'm just that little bit more worried now :-( If the disks are ok, what on earth could have happened and more importantly, how can I restore what was an operational system when I shut it down?! At this point you need to make a judgement call: which
amd64 mainboard compatibility list
While trying to find how not to get burned like we did with some older oddball Supermicro boards, I came across this page: http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html There is a request up top for new submissions (there are no 8.x entries), is feedback still wanted? If so, I've got a number of bad boards to add. I cannot stress enough how great it would be if this were updated. I'm server shopping at the moment and after running into various SMP and ACPI issues on some SM boards, I'm quite nervous about committing to any particular model or brand. Thanks, Charles ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
