Re: Intel EMT64 Xeon vs AMD Opteron
On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Scott Long wrote: With FreeBSD, it's a bit of a toss-up. There is no strong affinity set or enforced between process memory and where the process is running. Having some notion of affinity (i.e. NUMA support) would be a good thing. Oh, and the 4+2 configurations are typically pretty poor, regardless. For non-NUMA-aware operating systems, you should turn on Node Interleaving for the memory system which will spread the memory accesses across all processors. Hopefully all multi-processor Opteron system BIOSes will give you this option, my Tyan S2885 does. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD 5.3 on Dual Opteron -- experiences?
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, sp0ng3b0b wrote: I am getting a quote for a new server. I would like to get a box with 2x AMD Opterons and an Intel MF 1000 fiber gigabit card. Does anyone have any good/bad experiences with Opterons and FreeBSD 5.3? FreeBSD 5.3/i386 and 5.3/amd64 both work just fine on my Tyan S2885 (Thunder K8W) with dual Opteron 244's and 2GB RAM. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Is this a sign of memory going bad?
On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Chuck Robey wrote: I don't want to embarrass anyone here, but something needs to be said. Note this next sentence carefully: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A WORKING MEMORY TEST PROGRAM!!! Anyone who tells you otherwise is no friend of yours, because they are making your life hard. It's very alluring to assume that programs written to do a job actually do that job, and most especially in the case of memory test, one would *really* **REALLY** wish that Chuck here was lying, cause you honestly need a memory test program, but the truth is otherwise: memory test programs don't work. At the very best, if they spend 30 minutes carefully exercising memory, you get a factor that is maybe 10% reliable, and 90% wishful guessing. With that in mind, sometimes, the very best memory test programs can give you better ideas that memory you thought was failing IS failing. The opposite, proving that memory is good, is just totally, totally useless, you cannot take any data home at all about your memory being good. The memory-test programs are not entirely worthless. Just recently we had a lab of PCs where some of them would go wonky and randomly lock up hard. This was happening for months and we couldn't put our finger on the problem. We thought maybe it was something in our Windows build, so we tried booting Microsoft's stand-alone memory tester (yes, they have one, and I'm not sure where I got it, MSDN perhaps?), very similar to memtest86. After a random number of test passes, sometimes 100+ passes (many hours, overnight), some of the machines would lock up. No errors indicated, they just froze. Oops. Definately NOT a software problem. After fiddling around with some of the clock/voltage related BIOS settings, putting new thermal compound between the CPUs and heatsinks, reseating cards and memory, placing the PCs inside a hexagram drawn on the floor and dancing nak... nevermind... we got them to run the tests continuously through our entire 4-day Thanksgiving weekend without problems. For the last 4 days (including today), we haven't had any problems with them. So, these memtest programs can at least be valuable stress-testing tools but be prepared to run them for hours or days at a time before they will catch something. :-) -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 16-character username limit in quotas?
On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Dan Nelson wrote: In the last episode (Aug 19), Chris Dillon said: I've just run into a 16-character username limit in our quota support, or at least in the edquota command itself (5-CURRENT): edquota -u -e /afilesystem:614400:716800:4000:5000 areallylongusername edquota: areallylongusern: no such user Does anybody know what would it take to raise this limit to at least 32 characters? Try bumping MAXLOGNAME in /usr/include/sys/param.h and UT_NAMESIZE in /usr/include/utmp.h and rebuilding world. Thank you, I'm building a new kernel+world right now. For some reason I thought we had already bumped those particular limits up past 16 characters so I didn't look at them. I ran into this problem because I'm using Samba's winbindd with nsswitch, and the usernames are prepended with our Windows 2000 domain name, making them longer than usual. Samba, chown, ls, etc. don't seem to have a problem with these long names (nsswitch is great!), so they must not pay any attention to MAXLOGNAME and UT_NAMESIZE and that's what made me think it was specific to quotas. Is there any reason this couldn't be bumped up to 32 characters (or more) by default for better compatability with alternate namespaces? -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
16-character username limit in quotas?
I've just run into a 16-character username limit in our quota support, or at least in the edquota command itself (5-CURRENT): edquota -u -e /afilesystem:614400:716800:4000:5000 areallylongusername edquota: areallylongusern: no such user Does anybody know what would it take to raise this limit to at least 32 characters? -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Networking problem UPDATED
On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Steve Ireland wrote: The two interfaces are on different subnets: 192.168.0.0/24 and 192.168.10.0/24. You need to either add a static route between them or change their netmasks to at least a /21. Huh? They _must_ be on different subnets. You can't route one subnet across multiple network interfaces. Besides, a router always knows how to route packets between its own directly-attached networks, no additional routes are necessary. The problem here is that a route needs to be added for 192.168.10.0/24 - 192.168.0.100 in the upstream router(s), since the upstream router(s) do not currently know to send any packets destined for 192.168.10.0/24 to 192.168.0.100 for delivery. The upstream router is currently sending these packets to its own default gateway, which is likely even further upstream. IP routers aren't mind-readers, you have to tell them exactly where to send packets, but usually that is very simple. Running a routing protocol (such as RIP) on both the FreeBSD box in question and the upstream router(s) would automatically add the same route for you, but that is unnecessary in such a simple network configuration. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD box as router adding latency
On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Aloha Guy wrote: Already tried that and it did improve things a little. I tried setting the HZ to 1000 and it didn't make much of a difference. Is there a larger number that actually works well? You can try higher HZ numbers, but you might run into other problems. Experiment and see. Others have experimented with higher HZ numbers so you might want to check the list archives. Anyway, is a 1ms delay really that bad? -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD box as router adding latency
On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Aloha Guy wrote:
What do you have HZ set to (see sysctl kern.clockrate)? I think I
remember your original message showing you using pipes and queues
and the HZ setting can affect those. Also see if your latency
improves if you remove all pipe and queue rules (other ipfw rules
are OK).
Here is the HZ setting:
kern.clockrate: { hz = 100, tick = 1, profhz = 1024, stathz = 128 }
I'm not sure how to remove the pipe since I don't think the pipe
works until the queue is defined. When I removed the queues that
are configured for the pipe, the latency is back to normal though.
Like I said, remove both pipes and queues to test. However, pipes
_can_ be used without queues, but that is irrelevant here. Try
setting HZ to 1000 in your kernel config, recompile, reboot, and test
again. You should see something between a slight improvement to a
ten-fold improvement.
--
Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us
FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet
- Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures
- PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development
- http://www.freebsd.org
Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon?
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Re: FreeBSD box as router adding latency
On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Aloha Guy wrote: You're right that additional delay while adding a hop is to be expected, which is less than 0.1ms to the FreeBSD box but everything past the FreeBSD machine is adding atleast 5ms up to 300ms in the traceroutes when the normal is no more than 20ms for the same traceroute. I've already checked the NICs and they are all configured at their full rated speeds and full duplex. I even try using a Cardbus PCMCIA fxp0 Intel Pro/100S card on the FreeBSD box and it still had the same problem. I am using a September 2003 -CURRENT so I don't know if it's a issue with the current networking code back then or not. What do you have HZ set to (see sysctl kern.clockrate)? I think I remember your original message showing you using pipes and queues and the HZ setting can affect those. Also see if your latency improves if you remove all pipe and queue rules (other ipfw rules are OK). -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD box as router adding latency
On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Aloha Guy wrote: Any ideas what is causing this? Is it the xl0 driver because I've used FreeBSD machines as ethernet routers before with a similar setup except there was no NAT involved and used the fxp drivers and it never had this problem. Thanks for your help in advance! Additional delay while adding a hop is to be expected, no matter how fast your network or router is. You only added about 1ms on average, which is about right. The lost packet in the second traceroute might be due to a full/half-duplex mismatch between one of the NICs and the switch. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SCSI--LVD vs SE...
On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am I understanding this right?... Concerning SCSI, are LVD and SE (single ended) mutually exclusive? Yes, unless a SCSI bridge is used to separate the LVD and SE devices on the same SCSI bus. If any SE device is present on an LVD bus, the entire bus will revert to SE. That is, if I have a system that supports LVD drives, I want to configure those drives for LVD and not SE which would yield a smaller bandwidth? Like 1/2 at best, right? Being configured as LVD should happen automatically as long as everything you connect to the bus is LVD. You can achieve 40MB/sec at best with a Wide SE bus. A Wide LVD bus allows speeds of 80MB/sec up to 320MB/sec depending on the attached controller and devices. Finally, I have a Tyan S2468UNG motherboard with Ultra160 SCSI onboard (dual channel). I'm looking at pairing two Seagate 15K.3 (ST336753LW) drives with this board. Are these a good choice? Would I get better performance from having both drives on the same channel (and so, cable)? or would it be better to put one on channel A and the other on channel B (separate cables)? I doubt you would see much difference putting just two drives on two different Ultra160 channels, but if you have the channels and extra SCSI cables to spare, go ahead and use them. In the future I would like to add a third LVD drive (probably the same model with larger capacity). Again, all on the same channel? or split to second channel? I'm guessing the dual channel approach would yield better performance when writing across separate physical disks. Especially if three drives are involved. Again, on an Ultra160 channel, three new and very fast drives will come close but still will not fully use the available bandwidth. Spreading the drives across two channels can help with contention under very heavy loads, but depending on what you are using this for, you may see no difference at all using two channels rather than one. SCSI is far better at doing multiple devices per channel than IDE. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - x86-64, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: write behind caching
Moved to freebsd-questions, which is more appropriate... On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Mark Bojara wrote: One of our clients is running a FreeBSD 4.8 server with Samba for his Windows based financial system. He is having problems that the index files get corrupt. He phoned support for the financial system they told him he must disable Write behind caching on the server, However this is for a M$ server. Is there something equivilent for FreeBSD? This is almost always due to an application programming error, but you can't tell the developers that, and instead of fixing their problem, the developers nearly always tell you to turn off write caching. What they really mean to say is opportunistic locking. Turn that off in Samba and things will work smoothly, though much slower. This has _ABSOLUTELY NOTHING_ to do with any write caching performed by the server OS or storage subsystem, nor with their sync behaviours. This is entirely client-side caching (though server-orchestrated) and has only to do with SMB file locking and a _client_ performing write caching on a network file while other clients are performing read caching on the same file, and the whole ballet of cache flushings don't happen when they're supposed to. Or something like that. Before you turn off opportunistic locking, though, if the application uses the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) and/or Jet for its database backend, download the latest MDAC and/or Jet release from Microsoft's web site and install it on _every_ workstation. That kind of thing is ideal to put in a login script while using the silent install option. I believe the latest MDAC release is 2.8, and the latest Jet is 4.0 SP7. It will never hurt to install both, even if it turns out your application uses neither. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - x86-64, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon? ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Ugly Huge BSD Monster
On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Denis Troshin wrote: Almost every package I install requires a few other packages. This 'idea of using dependent packages' turns FreeBSD (and other unix-systems) to an ugly monster. At least the dependencies are taken care of for you automatically in FreeBSD, unlike some systems which require you to download and install each depedency manually. For example, I don't need Perl or Python but a few packages I install require them. Does exist a programming under unix without these dependencies? P.S. Under Windows it is possible to write not bad applications which depend just on libraries (KERNEL32, USER32, GDI32). And these libs exist on every base system!!! I have to deal with creating internal distribution packages for all kinds of Windows software just about every day, and the dependencies for Windows software can be much worse, especially for Microsoft's own software which seems to be among the worst. Microsoft Office XP alone depends on (when installed on a base Windows 98SE installation), no less than Microsoft Installer 2.x (MSI), Internet Explorer 6, MDAC, and several other non-Office bits and pieces that don't come to mind right now. Granted, they are included in the Office XP installer and it will install all of this by itself if you don't have any of them installed, but they are indeed separate depedencies. I break as many depedencies as I possibly can out of a particular piece of software into separate distribution packages with their own dependency chains. The FreeBSD ports/packages system just happens to already do this to a high degree, because it is a good idea. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - x86-64, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some electrons were mildly inconvenienced. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: which FreeBSD?
This belongs in -questions, not -smp. On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, David Newman wrote: Greetings. For a small office (~10 users), I am planning to build a mail and DNS server using FreeBSD-SMP; details below. My requirements are availability and performance, in that order. Which FreeBSD is better suited for this -- 4.8 or 5.1? 4.8-RELEASE or 4.8-STABLE Hardware: Compaq Proliant 1850R 6/550 (2 x 550-MHz PIII), 1 Gbyte RAM, 2 x 18-Gbyte SCSI drives 1000% overkill for only 10 users. As an example, I (still) have a 66MHz 486 with 48MB RAM and a single 2GB SCSI drive handling over 300 users with sendmail and cyrus-imapd. Focus on reliability foremost, so mirror those two SCSI drives you have. The Proliant 1850R doesn't offer the ability to use redundant memory, but it at least does ECC. You'll also have an extra processor already there if one happens to go south, and you would never notice it was gone. Software: postfix, courier-imap, bind Consider cyrus-imapd2 or cyrus-imapd22 instead of courier-imap. Very reliable, very fast, and offers you the ability to create a black box mail appliance that does not require the use of local user accounts, if you wish to go that route. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - x86-64, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some electrons were mildly inconvenienced. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: tree-based quotas for UFS/UFS2?
On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Ryan Dooley wrote: Has anybody done work on Tree-based quotas for UFS/UFS2? As an administrator I'm finding more and more reasons that such a thing would be a good thing. By tree-based you mean the ability to define this directory and everything under it gets X amount of storage, regardless of owner? If so, I also wish this ability existed, and I've talked with several administrators of ISPs that sorely need that ability as well. If it is a monumental undertaking, maybe some hosting providers who use FreeBSD and would greatly benefit from such a feature would be willing to fund it. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32, IA64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures - x86-64, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some electrons were mildly inconvenienced. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Apache not killing subprocesses, only on FreeBSD
On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Lee Nelson wrote: myprogram.pl reads a few parameters from STDIN, and then forks to work in the background: my $pid = fork; exit if $pid; die ($pn couldn't fork $!\n) unless defined $pid; POSIX::setsid() or die ($pn can't start a new session: $!\n); Any clues or suggestions welcome. The following method to daemonize a PERL process works for me in FreeBSD (I don't remember why I fork exit twice, so don't ask): require 'sys/syscall.ph'; fork exit; syscall(SYS_setsid) || die Can't call setsid(): $!; chdir(/); open(STDIN, /dev/null) || die Can't redirect stdin: $!; open(STDOUT, /dev/null) || die Can't redirect stdout: $!; open(STDERR, /dev/null) || die Can't redirect stderr: $!; fork exit; -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32 (Intel x86) and Alpha architectures - IA64, PowerPC, UltraSPARC, ARM, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some electrons were mildly inconvenienced. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-questions in the body of the message
Re: Is there such a thing like a TCP proxy|relay?
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Carlos Carnero wrote: ok, this is another wacky question. I have connected two subnetworks to my FreeBSD router to the internet. By design they shouln't be able to communicate between them--which I have done with IP Filter. What I'd like to do now is to make a TCP proxy/relay on my firewall/router. For instance, opening port 3389 on the firewall (from the inside, machine A) would open port 3389 of machine B that sits on the other network. Is there a port that can handle that? Yes. ports/net/bsdproxy. I like it because it uses kqueue()/kevent() to do its thing rather than poll()/select(). -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32 (Intel x86) and Alpha architectures - IA64, PowerPC, UltraSPARC, ARM, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some electrons were mildly inconvenienced. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-questions in the body of the message
Re: Boot stuck at F1 after swapping drives
On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Andrew Y Ng wrote: Hi all, I shutdown FreeBSD and changed my harddrive and booted up Win2K this morning (needed Windoze for something real quick). I put the FreeBSD harddrive back and it wouldn't boot, it got stuck at the F1 boot0 prompt. Like it couldn't find the MBR or something. How do I get it to boot again? This is weird. Maybe I didn't shut it down correctly this morning. I encountered the same kind of weirdness when I was trying to build a FreeBSD-based firewall for somebody and un-plugged my normal drive(s) which have Windows XP and FreeBSD installed on them and then proceeded to do a fresh FreeBSD 4.7 installation on a new lone disk. Once finished, it wouldn't boot. I would get Operating system missing with the standard boot sector installed, and with the boot manager installed, it would hang after F1. Using the install CD boot-loader, I could unload the CD kernel and load /kernel off of the newly installed drive and start to boot it, but it would hang immediately after issuing 'boot'. So, I try a completely different hard drive (a little bigger and newer, but only a 10GB drive), do a 4.7 installation on it, and it worked. Then I re-installed on the same drive, and it DIDN'T work. Nothing changed in the BIOS or hardware, just a re-install. I tried re-installing over and over again with different boot options and different ways of partitioning it. I tried with both 4.6 and 4.7 releases, thinking maybe there was some kind of bootloader breakage in 4.7. No go. What type of IDE controller are you using? I was using a Promise 133 TX2 add-on card. I tried the on-board ATA33 (PIIX4) controller on my system, and encountered the same problem, though I never actually completely removed the add-on card. It is possible the Promise BIOS was causing problems even though it claimed it didn't load since I didn't have any devices attached to the card. I racked my brain with that problem for hours and finally gave up. Luckily when I plugged my regular drives back in XP and FreeBSD booted up just fine on those. One thing I probably should have tried was to dd a bunch of zeroes over the first few MB of the drive so that I'd be starting with a fresh drive before installation. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32 (Intel x86) and Alpha architectures - IA64, PowerPC, UltraSPARC, ARM, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some electrons were mildly inconvenienced. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-questions in the body of the message
