I'm an experienced hand with Linux (Gentoo, more recently Arch) and with FreeBSD. I've recently become interested in OpenBSD and have just done a test install of 4.5 on an old Thinkpad 600x (650 mhz, .5 Gb, 20 Gb 5400 rpm disk, 3com Megahertz pcmcia ethernet adapter) for purposes of evaluation.
Using the system to download and install packages and doing general setup tasks, it behaves normally, no problems. But today, I am attempting to rsync (I've arranged for the rsync daemon to be started at boot time) the contents of my home directory from a FreeBSD system (something I do all the time with other targets, for backup purposes, and to allow me to use different machines as appropriate). I've twice had the rsync fail, with the client complaining that it could not write to its output pipe. The OpenBSD system was sitting at its login prompt, and attempting to login proved impossible. Characters got echoed extremely slowly, if at all, and when they did, they got echoed multiple times. I could not ping the system, though it was up, but obviously in distress. As an a very experienced systems programmer (though I haven't done any OS-level work in years), I'd offer the guess, and its only a guess, that the system was being flooded with interrupts. Unable to ssh in, I finally just turned the power off and rebooted. After the fscks, the system came up normally. I checked /var/log/message and found nothing unusual. I resumed the rsync and ran into the same problem again after a relatively short time. I am now on my third attempt, this time running 'top' on the OpenBSD machine, and in the spirit of Heisenberg, the rsync is proceeding normally, almost finished. I normally run Arch Linux on this machine (different disk) and have had no problems with it (I did the same rsync from the same source machine uneventfully), so I'm not too inclined to suspect the hardware, old as it is, except perhaps the disk, which is different hardware than when I run Linux. Here's my question: should I be able to provoke this problem again, can the collective you suggest things I should be doing, log files I ought to be looking at, perhaps running with a kernel debugger available, etc., to have a chance of debugging this problem? It's possible that this old machine or the disk that's been gathering dust for some time has decided to malfunction. But since I'm evaluating OpenBSD, I'd like to either exonerate it or confirm that it's a bug in the system. Any help would be appreciated. /Don Allen
