FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE stability?

2013-09-30 Thread Brett Glass
How stable are folks finding FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE to be? The 
improvements are welcome, but there have been a few troubling 
messages about kernel panics and VM issues on the various mailing 
lists. It's never clear until the release drops whether these are 
actual problems with the software or hardware defects in individual 
systems, so I am eager to hear how the new release is working for everyone.


--Brett Glass

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Re: [FreeBSD-Announce] vBSDcon Registrations Only Open For 30 More Days!

2013-09-23 Thread Brett Glass

All:

It's good to see corporate support of BSD, but at the same time I 
have mixed feelings about certain corporations -- Verisign among 
them -- hosting BSD-related conferences or becoming involved in the 
development of BSD-based operating systems. Why? Because Verisign, 
based in Reston, Virginia (the city next door to Vienna, VA, home 
of the NSA), has strong ties to this shadowy agency. The NSA, in 
turn -- as reported in documents recently leaked by Edward Snowden 
-- has a very strong interest in weakening the security of 
cryptographic algorithms, cryptographic software, and operating 
systems. We may want to look this gift horse very carefully in the 
mouth, or at least monitor very closely "contributions" of code 
that might introduce backdoors or weaknesses.


--Brett Glass

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Help! Cannot boot after freebsd-update update to 9.1-p5

2013-07-28 Thread Brett Glass
Help! I just used freebsd-update to upgrade a system to FreeBSD 
9.1-RELEASE-p5 to close the latest security holes. I then rebuilt 
my custom kernel and tried to reboot. I'm now getting the message


Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
Guessed BIOS device 0x not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:

at boot time.

The strange thing is that when I boot the system from a FreeBSD 9.1 
(AMD64) USB key, I can mount and read the file system on the hard 
drive that will not boot. There doesn't seem to be any problem with 
it. I've tried copying /boot/loader over from the USB key; still 
can't boot. Tried moving the GENERIC kernel over from the USB key 
into /boot/kernel, just in case there was a problem with my custom 
one; still can't boot. Not sure what to try next. Any ideas would 
be much appreciated!


--Brett Glass

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Bad kernel with make -j?

2013-04-17 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

I've just had to resurrect a machine which apparently failed 
because the kernel was built with the make -j option.


As reported in the make(1) man page, the purpose of the -j option 
is to let the make program build multiple portions of a program 
concurrently on a machine with multiple CPUs. The idea is to make 
use of SMP to speed up the build process. Unfortunately, after 
updating a FreeBSD 9.0 system with freebsd-update (and seeing some 
changes that would affect the custom kernel the machine was 
running), I rebuilt the kernel using the -j5 option. (The machine 
has 2 cores and 4 threads, but threads block due to I/O as well as 
memory access. So, when it works properly, -j5 is the fastest option.)


The result was a kernel in which some compiled-in modules -- in 
particular, netgraph nodes -- weren't accessible. mpd5 began 
spewing odd messages, and VPN connections would not come up. I'd 
built the kernel with the NO_MODULES option, so the modules that 
were missing couldn't be loaded dynamically.


Rebuilding the kernel using a single-threaded "make" solved the problem.

Have others seen the same symptoms? I'd like to be able to do fast, 
multithreaded kernel builds, but will obviously have to avoid it if 
the resulting kernels are corrupted.


--Brett Glass

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Re: When will binary packages be back?

2013-04-10 Thread Brett Glass

Just made that into a batch file for my library. Should be a target in
the standard ports Makefile, IMHO. Maybe call it "rdistclean". Perhaps
this could be submitted as a PR.

--Brett Glass

At 12:37 PM 4/10/2013, Greg Larkin wrote:


Here's an easy way to delete all of the distfiles for a port and its
dependencies:

cd /usr/ports/www/apache22 # Or whatever
make distclean
make all-depends-list | xargs -n1 -I % sh -c "cd % && make distclean"


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Re: When will binary packages be back?

2013-04-10 Thread Brett Glass
Unfortunately, I've never experimented with pkgng, so will have to 
come up to speed on

this. Might be a temporary workaround.

In the meantime, I'm trying to install Apache 2.2 on a small 
server. So far, just to
build the port, the machine has built Perl, Python, m4, Berkeley 
DB, and an incredible
assortment of other stuff that I do not want or need on that 
machine! And because
the "make distclean" command in the FreeBSD ports system does not 
remove code for
dependencies, I'll have tons of source -- including GPLed code, 
which I do not want
to touch -- on the machine unless I do a painstaking manual search 
and removal. Aaargh!


--Brett Glass

At 12:03 PM 4/10/2013, pete wright wrote:


can't answer for the freebsd project - but the folks at pc-bsd have
made a 9.1 pkgng repository available:

http://blog.pcbsd.org/2013/04/pc-bsd-announces-package-repository-for-pc-bsd-and-freebsd-9-1-release/

there is also an east coast mirror hosted by NycBUG/NYI:

http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2013-March/014741.html

-pete


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When will binary packages be back?

2013-04-10 Thread Brett Glass
For many years, I've used FreeBSD binary packages to avoid long 
waits and/or having to set up a special build machine when creating 
small systems. But even though the development server security 
breach is now long past, there are no published binary packages for 
FreeBSD 9.1. When will they be back?


--Brett Glass

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How close is 9.1 to release?

2012-11-15 Thread Brett Glass
Have begun getting warnings from freebsd-update that 9.0 is close to its
EOL, but the successor release (9.1) is not even out yet... which means
that there's no way to gauge its stability or quality by watching for
reported problems. How's 9.1-RELEASE coming? Any showstoppers?

--Brett Glass
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Re: How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?

2012-08-13 Thread Brett Glass

At 12:59 PM 8/13/2012, Polytropon wrote:


I've never seen a system having a /boot/GENERIC directory
containing the GENERIC kernel.


It does not come that way. The Handbook recommends that one
manuall copy the original kernel from the distribution into
/boot/GENERIC before building a custom kernel, for use in
emergencies and during version upgrades.

--Brett Glass 


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Re: How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?

2012-08-13 Thread Brett Glass

At 11:33 AM 8/13/2012, Michael Sierchio wrote:


And it does, in my experience.  If the hash of the kernel doesn't
match that of the distribution (or recent update), freebsd-update
leaves it alone.


That is what I thought it would do, based on the docs. However, 
when I recently ran freebsd-update on a FreeBSD 9.0 machine with a 
module-less custom kernel at /boot/kernel/kernel, it fetched a 
GENERIC kernel and overwrote the custom kernel with it. 
Interestingly, it didn't bring in any modules; it just overwrote the one file.


--Brett Glass 


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Re: How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?

2012-08-13 Thread Brett Glass

At 05:24 AM 8/13/2012, Polytropon wrote:


That seems to be the default behaviour, as freebsd-update is
not supposed to be used with a custom kernel. It works with
GENERIC kernels (because it updates them by overwriting).


Actually, freebsd-update is claimed to respect custom kernels. See 
the FreeBSD Handbook at 25.2.2:


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html

"The freebsd-update utility can automatically update the GENERIC 
kernel only. If a custom kernel is in use, it will have to be 
rebuilt and reinstalled after freebsd-update finishes installing 
the rest of the updates. However, freebsd-update will detect and 
update the GENERIC kernel in /boot/GENERIC (if it exists), even if 
it is not the current (running) kernel of the system."


But in fact, freebsd-update did not update the kernel in 
/boot/GENERIC on my system. Instead, it trashed the customer kernel 
in /boot/kernel, and did so with no warning. If there had been a 
power outage or other problem before I could rebuild, the system 
would have been disabled.


--Brett Glass

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How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?

2012-08-12 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

Just ran freebsd-update (fetch, then install) on a system on which 
I run a customized kernel, and discovered that it has overwritten 
my custom kernel... even though I'd copied the original to 
/boot/GENERIC when I first installed the system. I was under the 
impression that creating /boot/GENERIC, and putting the GENERIC 
kernel in it, would cause freebsd-update to update that directory 
rather than one's custom kernel. I now must rebuild the kernel to 
keep the machine working.


What went wrong, and how do stop it from recurring?

--Brett Glass

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Maximum number of "tun" pseudo-devices

2012-05-13 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

I'm running a busy FreeBSD-based that may handle large numbers of 
simultaneous connections. I'm currently using software that creates 
a "tun" device for each connection. However, after it hits tun127 
(128 pseudo-devices), it doesn't seem to want to create any more. 
What sets the limit on the number of "tun" devices that can exist 
in the system, and how can the limit be adjusted? Is there a 
similar limit on, say, "ng" devices?


--Brett Glass

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System initialization

2012-04-18 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

I have several nearly identical servers in my network, and would 
like to control their configurations entirely from one file (such 
as /etc/rc.conf). Unfortunately, while some flavors of embedded 
Linux have systems to do this, FreeBSD doesn't make it easy. A lot 
of files (/etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/ttys, /etc/crontab, 
etc.) have to be set up independently of rc.conf, and since rc.conf 
can be run many times at boot and thereafter (for example, 
/etc/rc.firewall uses it to suck in environment variables), one 
doesn't want to generate configuration files directly from within 
it, but rather should edit the configuration file for each daemon 
-- using environment variables in rc.conf -- just each is started. 
Also, it may be impossible to generate configurations for some 
daemons or system components before they start, so it might be 
necessary to start with some default file, edit it, and then send a 
signal to force a reconfiguration. Most of the default rc scripts, 
in /etc/rc and in ports, don't always provide well for generation 
of configuration files and/or command line options and arguments 
prior to starting daemons.


And then, there's the question of how to restart daemons (but not 
the whole system!) when configurations are changed... when this is possible.


Has anyone out there worked on the problem of generating 
configuration files for important daemons (e.g. mpd, dnscache from 
the djbdns suite, ntpd, etc.) at boot time based on rc.conf -- and 
as many as possible early enough so that the daemons whose 
configurations are being generated won't already have been started? 
And has anyone attacked the problem of dynamic reconfiguration? I'm 
sure I could work out my own scheme for this, but don't want to 
reinvent the wheel if someone's already come up with a clever 
system to do it on FreeBSD.


--Brett Glass

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RE: Quick build of stripped-down kernel

2011-11-25 Thread Brett Glass

At 10:39 AM 11/24/2011, Terrence Koeman wrote:


Add

makeoptions NO_MODULES=yes

to your KERNCONF.


Thank you (and thanks also to the other folks who responded in 
private e-mail). It also has a second advantage: besides disabling 
generation of the .ko files, it also suppresses compilation of 
drivers that are not going to be linked statically into the kernel. 
Build on an older Pentium II server took about 10-12% of the time! 
Worth knowing about.


--Brett Glass

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Quick build of stripped-down kernel

2011-11-24 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

Happy Thanksgiving! This week, I've been building FreeBSD 9.0-RC2 
kernels for various machines, and on some of the older and slower 
ones it's been taking quite a long time. One of the reasons for 
this is that even if you strip 98% of the drivers out of the 
kernel, they are all still built as loadable modules. The machines 
in question will NEVER use those modules, so it's a waste of time 
and disk space.


How hard would it be to create a build target for "make" that would 
avoid building the loadable modules and just leave them out of the 
directory where the new kernel is placed after installation? I am 
not intimately familiar with the cascade of makefiles that does the 
build I could probably figure out what to tweak, but if someone 
who is expert in this can help it would be appreciated. It would 
save me countless hours.


--Brett Glass

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Memory error?

2011-11-04 Thread Brett Glass

All:

Just got these messages in the log after installing FreeBSD 9.0-RC1 
on an older machine. The system hasn't shown any glitches or 
crashes, so the error wasn't fatal. I'm guessing that there was an 
error in cache memory that was corrected by ECC; is this correct?


Nov  4 08:31:21 joe kernel: MCA: Bank 3, Status 0x9001010a
Nov  4 08:31:21 joe kernel: MCA: Global Cap 0x0005, 
Status 0x

Nov  4 08:31:21 joe kernel: MCA: Vendor "GenuineIntel", ID 0x652, APIC ID 0
Nov  4 08:31:21 joe kernel: MCA: CPU 0 COR GCACHE L2 ERR error

--Brett Glass

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Timing of FreeBSD 9.0-RC2?

2011-11-03 Thread Brett Glass
I've been working with FreeBSD 9.0-RC1, and it's good but still has 
a few rough edges. I understand that since RC1, llvm and Clang have 
been updated and can now successfully compile the world (an 
un-GNUed toolchain at last!) and that some disk bugs have been 
fixed. Is there an ETA for RC2? Need to build servers, and since 
freebsd-update can't do binary updates between release candidates 
I'd like a version that has the latest fixes.


--Brett Glass

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Approximate date of RC1?

2011-10-14 Thread Brett Glass
Just wondering if a date has been set for posting of FreeBSD 
9.0-RC1. I have some servers to build that will need fixes made after BETA3


--Brett Glass

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Timeline for 9.0-RELEASE?

2011-10-04 Thread Brett Glass
Just looked at the project Web site, and the timeline for 
9.0-RELEASE is way, way out of date. If all goes well, when is 9.0 
expected to be released? What remains to be done?


--Brett Glass

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Patent expired; time to add protocol to FreeBSD?

2011-09-20 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

The Hifn, Inc. patent on the compression used in Microsoft's MPPC 
protocol expired earlier this year. Shouldn't the code at


http://mavhome.dp.ua/MPPC/

at last be added to the source tree to support it?

--Brett Glass

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Re: ICMP redirects and FreeBSD

2011-09-18 Thread Brett Glass

At 11:06 PM 9/17/2011, Brian Seklecki (Mobile) wrote:

Only a few unsound routing/network topology configurations really 
depend on redirects these days; They can't be trusted because they 
can't be authenticated?  ~BAS


There's no cryptologically sound authentication, true, but there 
isn't for proxy ARP either (and that's one of the other options 
that I'd rather not use). Redirects do have the advantage that they 
can be firewalled, so that they will not be allowed to originate 
outside the network and will only be accepted from certain trusted 
hosts within it. If the firewall rules are correct, an outside 
attacker can't spoof redirects.


My interest in this is that I am trying to figure out the best way 
to manage a routed corporate network with rapidly changing topology 
and frequent assignments and reassignments of addresses and address 
blocks. RIP is a disastrous mess and very chatty. But allowing a 
gateway to tell routers "below" it in the network hierarchy about 
one another's address assignments via ICMP redirects is very 
efficient and manageable. It means that only the gateway's routing 
table must be updated to do an address assignment. What's more, 
there's virtually zero propagation time and no flapping.


The problem seems to be that RFC 1821 ignores this use of ICMP 
redirects. It recommends not allowing any router to accept ICMP 
redirects, and this appears to have been hard coded into FreeBSD's 
network stack.


--Brett Glass

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ICMP redirects and FreeBSD

2011-09-17 Thread Brett Glass
Here's a networking question: Does FreeBSD generate and accept ICMP 
redirects? Is it controllable via tuneables? How long do routing 
tables generated by ICMP redirects last?


--Brett Glass

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Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system

2011-09-13 Thread Brett Glass

At 09:16 AM 9/13/2011, Dan Nelson wrote:


It doesn't roll over in less than a second; it rolls over in 16777215 /
3579545 = 4.6 seconds.  Your negative time delta problem isn't due to
rollover.


If that's indeed the case, the kernel must be doing the math wrong.

I wonder how many other systems this is affecting.

--Brett Glass

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Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system

2011-09-13 Thread Brett Glass
Thank you! Since it's tunable at runtime I just tested it, and -- sure enough --
no negative ping times.

Ironically, it was the kernel that selected the ACPI timer, scoring it higher
than the timestamp counter as a clock source. Perhaps code should be added to 
ensure that the timer is not chosen if it rolls over in less than a second, 
since this clearly leads to imprecision and missed rollovers.

--Brett Glass

At 11:04 PM 9/12/2011, Adam Vande More wrote:
 
>it's a runtime tunable so /etc/sysctl.conf

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Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system

2011-09-12 Thread Brett Glass

At 06:54 PM 9/12/2011, b. f. wrote:


If you are just upgrading now, why not use 9 BETA?


Production machine.

Also, whenever we create a new production box, we normally pick the
release (not beta; we need to be able to do binary upgrades and
this is only supported from one release to another) with the EOL
that's the farthest out.

We'll retire the hardware before we will run non-release code on a
production box.

--Brett Glass

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Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system

2011-09-12 Thread Brett Glass
At 06:15 PM 9/12/2011, Chuck Swiger wrote:
 
>Your system's timekeeping appears to be busted.  Are you running ntpd with 
>"tinker step 0.0" or some home-grown mechanism which might be forcibly 
>stepping the clock rather than skewing it, by any chance?

Nothing like that.

>Anyway, the output of:
>
>  sysctl -a kern.timecounter
>
>...is likely to be informative.  

Here it is:

kern.timecounter.tick: 1
kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-safe(850) i8254(0) dummy(-100)
kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-safe
kern.timecounter.stepwarnings: 0
kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.mask: 4294967295
kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.counter: 5754
kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.frequency: 1193182
kern.timecounter.tc.i8254.quality: 0
kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-safe.mask: 16777215
kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-safe.counter: 7967112
kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-safe.frequency: 3579545
kern.timecounter.tc.ACPI-safe.quality: 850
kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.mask: 4294967295
kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.counter: 4058536290
kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.frequency: 501141177
kern.timecounter.tc.TSC.quality: 800
kern.timecounter.invariant_tsc: 0

This is very instructive. I didn't know that FreeBSD used the Pentium internal 
timestamp counter for anything but profiling.

I am noticing here that the "mask" (which I assume is the maximum value just 
before a rollover) for the "ACPI-safe" timer is very small. Maybe it's rolling 
over very frequently and/or the system is missing some of the rollovers. This 
would cause it to calculate negative times, of course.

>Try switching to another clock type, especially ACPI-safe if it hasn't been 
>chosen by default.  

No docs on how to do this. Is this done by, for example, setting 

kern.timecounter.hardware="TSC"

in loader.conf?

>Your CPU is probably too old to have a power-state invariant TSC, but if you 
>disable SpeedStep, powerd and similar which might change the processor 
>frequency, TSC might work OK also.

I've already turned off all power saving mechanisms listed in the BIOs setup, 
including clock speed modulation. So, the TSC ought to be pretty stable. At 
least it's worth a shot. 

--Brett Glass

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RE: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system

2011-09-12 Thread Brett Glass

More information regarding the odd behavior I'm seeing. Turns out
that packets do not even need to leave the machine for it to
report large negative ping times, on the order of more than half
a second. (See below.) Clearly something is odd about timekeeping
in this system (SiS motherboard chipset, PII-generation Celeron
but still effectively a "686") which was not a problem when it was
running FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE (as it was before). What's more, it
appears that the negative ping times being shown for pings of
localhost are off by about -687 ms, consistently. Any ideas?
I am wondering if perhaps some recent change to the kernel
assumed that one would always have a faster CPU than the old
Celeron this machine is running, and that there is a race
condition or an error in the kernel code.

--Brett Glass

# ping localhost
PING localhost (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=-0.148 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=-0.151 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=-686.111 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=-0.180 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.110 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=686.351 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=-686.376 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=0.121 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=-686.402 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=-686.105 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=686.623 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=0.107 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=0.119 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=0.418 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=0.401 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=-0.169 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=0.113 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=17 ttl=64 time=0.401 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=18 ttl=64 time=-686.117 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=19 ttl=64 time=0.115 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=20 ttl=64 time=0.111 ms

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Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system

2011-09-12 Thread Brett Glass

Here's a puzzler.

I just put FreeBSD 8.1 up on an old (but good) 500 MHz Celeron with 
half a gig of RAM. Interfaces are classic xl (3Com) and dc (DEC 
tulip). Works quite nicely except for one quirk: ping times that 
ought to be positive (no more than 200 ms worst case) are coming 
out negative! Can't figure out what might be causing this. dmesg 
output is as follows:


Copyright (c) 1992-2010 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p2 #5: Fri Apr 15 16:10:53 MST 2011
br...@washington.lariat.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/WASHINGTON i386
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron (501.14-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x665  Family = 6  Model = 6  Stepping = 5
  
Features=0x183f9ff
real memory  = 536870912 (512 MB)
avail memory = 515813376 (491 MB)
acpi0:  on motherboard
acpi0: [ITHREAD]
acpi0: Power Button (fixed)
Timecounter "ACPI-safe" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 850
acpi_timer0: <24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz> port 0x408-0x40b on acpi0
cpu0:  on acpi0
pcib0:  port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
pci0:  on pcib0
atapci0:  port 
0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xffa0-0xffaf at devic

e 0.1 on pci0
ata0:  on atapci0
ata0: [ITHREAD]
ata1:  on atapci0
ata1: [ITHREAD]
isab0:  at device 1.0 on pci0
isa0:  on isab0
pci0:  at device 1.1 (no driver attached)
pci0:  at device 1.2 (no driver attached)
pcib1:  at device 2.0 on pci0
pci1:  on pcib1
vgapci0:  port 0xbc00-0xbc7f mem 
0xee80-0xeeff,0xef6f-0xef6f

 irq 11 at device 0.0 on pci1
xl0: <3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0xdc00-0xdc7f mem 
0xefffaf80-0xefffafff irq 11 at devic

e 8.0 on pci0
miibus0:  on xl0
xlphy0: <3c905C 10/100 internal PHY> PHY 24 on miibus0
xlphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
xl0: Ethernet address: 00:01:03:be:8b:c1
xl0: [ITHREAD]
dc0:  port 0xd800-0xd8ff mem 
0xefffa800-0xefffabff irq 12 at device 9.0 o

n pci0
miibus1:  on dc0
ukphy0:  PHY 1 on miibus1
ukphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
dc0: Ethernet address: 00:14:bf:5b:f5:ed
dc0: [ITHREAD]
xl1: <3Com 3c905B-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0xd400-0xd47f mem 
0xefffaf00-0xefffaf7f irq 9 at device

 10.0 on pci0
miibus2:  on xl1
xlphy1: <3Com internal media interface> PHY 24 on miibus2
xlphy1:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
xl1: Ethernet address: 00:40:ca:97:13:7a
xl1: [ITHREAD]
acpi_button0:  on acpi0
acpi_button0: enable wake failed
atrtc0:  port 0x70-0x71 irq 8 on acpi0
orm0:  at iomem 
0xc-0xc7fff,0xc8000-0xc87ff,0xc8800-0xd7fff pnpid ORM on is

a0
sc0:  at flags 0x100 on isa0
sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300>
vga0:  at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa-0xb on isa0
atkbdc0:  at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0
atkbd0:  irq 1 on atkbdc0
kbd0 at atkbd0
atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
atkbd0: [ITHREAD]
Timecounter "TSC" frequency 501141912 Hz quality 800
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
ipfw2 initialized, divert loadable, nat enabled, rule-based 
forwarding enabled, default to accept, l

ogging disabled
load_dn_sched dn_sched PRIO loaded
load_dn_sched dn_sched QFQ loaded
load_dn_sched dn_sched RR loaded
load_dn_sched dn_sched WF2Q+ loaded
load_dn_sched dn_sched FIFO loaded
ad0: 9787MB  at ata0-master UDMA66
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
Bump sched buckets to 64 (was 0)
xl0: promiscuous mode enabled
xl0: promiscuous mode disabled
dc0: TX underrun -- increasing TX threshold
dc0: TX underrun -- increasing TX threshold

Any hints here as to what's wrong?

--Brett Glass

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Re: Huge interrupt overhead reported after RAM added to Atom-based system

2011-09-04 Thread Brett Glass

At 05:33 PM 9/4/2011, Robert Bonomi wrote:


Does sound sorta-like VM thrashing.

Could it be hardware based _bank-switching_ on memory?

This would cause an intterrupt every time successive memory accesses were in
differnt 'banks'.


Indeed. In fact, when you put in a 4GB module, the BIOS reports 
that you have 1GB of "4GB+ memory" (a possible indication that the 
last gigabyte is mapped into some special space). Maybe there's 
something like PAE going on. Anyone know what might be up? (Copying 
this message back to the list thread)


--Brett Glass 


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Re: Cutting sendmail out of the loop

2011-09-04 Thread Brett Glass

Johan:

Actually, since the system I'm building is meant to be very secure 
and appliance-like, it doesn't ever need to get mail "out of the 
system." And it has limited memory, so it shouldn't be running a 
mail daemon. At most, it needs a mail system that can ONLY mail 
locally, solely for the purpose of satisfying programs that want to 
send users status via mail. (The mail files will be trimmed by 
newsyslog, so they can't consume infinite space.) Even the 
Dragonfly mail daemon would be overkill.


I've tried putting mail.local(8) in as the "sendmail" program in 
mailer.conf, but it turns out that there are problems with command 
line options. Not only doesn't mail.local(8) understand all of the 
fancy options that Sendmail accepts; it doesn't even understand 
some of the simpler ones that are emitted by mail(8)! For example, 
mail(8) uses the -i option when invoking sendmail, to keep it from 
treating lines with just a dot as an end of file marker. 
mail.local(8) doesn't even have that "feature;" it always waits for 
EOF. So, it doesn't have that command line option and balks if you include it.


I'm thinking that a simple wrapper around mail.local(8) that 
processed the command line options (Has anyone written one? I find 
it hard to believe that no one has) would allow mail.local to serve 
as a local mailer and bypass sendmail(8). If someone handed it an 
address with an "@" (or, for that matter, anything else that wasn't 
the name of a local user), mail.local(8) would just reject it.


--Brett Glass

At 02:35 PM 9/4/2011, Johan Hendriks wrote:


Maybe ssmtp is something you can use.
It is in ports, it does get mail out of the system.
I use it on all of my servers so i can receive the cron mails and so on.

Personaly i think sendmail should be replaced by such small mailer.
Also Dragonfly has removed Sendmail for there own small and clean 
mailer called DMA.

DMA - DragonFly Mail Agent

Gr
Johan Hendriks
Double L



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Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 10.0.1392 / Virus Database: 1520/3876 - Release Date: 09/04/11


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Cutting sendmail out of the loop

2011-09-04 Thread Brett Glass
I'm creating some small FreeBSD servers that shouldn't be able to 
send mail to, or receive mail from, the outside world. I was 
originally just going to set sendmail_enable="NONE" in /etc/rc.conf 
and turn off the mailing of output from various utilities (e.g. 
cron), but alas there seem to be a few programs I may need to run 
that insist upon sending mail. So, I'd like to see if I can set up 
local delivery of mail without invoking the memory- and cpu-hungry 
program that is sendmail. I'm therefore wondering what would happen 
if I just put /usr/libexec.mail.local in as "sendmail" and 
"send-mail" in mailer.conf and leaving out the rest of the entries. 
Does anyone on the list have experience with doing this or 
something similar? Sendmail has a lot of command line options that 
mail.local does not, but they seem to be rarely invoked by programs 
that do things such as mail output to a local user.


--Brett Glass

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Re: "at" command and mail

2011-09-03 Thread Brett Glass

At 08:26 PM 9/3/2011, Adam Vande More wrote:


Call a shell script which preforms the actions you want.


Needlessly complex, and doesn't handle the case of stderr.

Since the utility has the ability to force mail to be sent, it 
should also have an option not to send it, IMHO.


--Brett Glass

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Re: Huge interrupt overhead reported after RAM added to Atom-based system

2011-09-03 Thread Brett Glass
Have been doing more experimentation regarding this problem. It 
doesn't occur with a 1 GB memory module in the machine, nor with a 
2 GB module -- only a 4 GB module.


This makes me wonder if there's some sort of memory bank switching 
or extended addressing mechanism here (like PAE). Perhaps it's 
causing some sort of interrupt every time a certain area of memory 
(perhaps the topmost portion) is accessed?


I'd like to experiment with having FreeBSD try to use less than the 
full 4 GB (e.g., to make it act as if memory ended at, say, 3 GB) 
but I'm not sure how to tell the kernel to do that.


--Brett Glass

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Re: "at" command and mail

2011-09-03 Thread Brett Glass
At 02:35 PM 9/3/2011, Robert Bonomi wrote:
 
>Is 'atrun' actually sending the mails or is 'cron' doing it?  'atrun' is
>invoked by 'cron', from a specification in the system crontab file.

/usr/src/libexec/atrun/atrun.c shows an invocation of sendmail(8) directly
from atrun(8).

>Cron emails *whenever* a cron-scheduled job produces stdout or stderr
>output.

atrun intentionally doesn't produce output unless it encounters an error;
see the same source file.

>You could, in theory, have the crontab line _append_ output to a filename
>based on a timestamp, however, that intermixes output from all users.

One way to avoid problems would be to create a file name from a timestamp
and a pid.

The key thing, though, is to avoid mailing on machines that don't have
mail.

--Brett 

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Huge interrupt overhead reported after RAM added to Atom-based system

2011-09-03 Thread Brett Glass
I've just seen something very peculiar. I have here a dual Atom 
(D525) system which was running with 1 GB of RAM, and this morning 
I put a 4 GB module into the system instead. Suddenly, the 
systat(8) and top(8) commands were both reporting bursts of 
interrupt overhead as high as 25% of total CPU capacity. Yet, in 
the display from the systat -vmstat option, no additional 
interrupts were appearing on the right hand side of the screen 
where interrupt sources were listed.


The system is running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE.

The documentation for several motherboards online mention that the 
Atom can be run with 4 GB of RAM with a "64 bit operating system."


I can't tell whether something non-obvious is going on under the 
hood -- either in the chipset or in the CPUs -- that's racking up 
overhead, or if the interrupt overhead doesn't exist at all and the 
reported CPU load is an artifact of some weirdness in the kernel. I 
need to know, though, before I deploy the system... so I'd 
appreciate any advice or ideas from any kernel experts who might be 
reading messages here.


--Brett Glass

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Re: "at" command and mail

2011-09-03 Thread Brett Glass

At 10:55 AM 9/3/2011, Adam Vande More wrote:

If you redirect the output from the command to /dev/null or other 
file, you shouldn't recieve an email unless you've also specified -m.


True. But that's awkward, and if you have a job that runs more than 
once, it'd be convenient to be able to keep the output from each run.


I'd like to see a configuration option to send the output from each 
"at" job to a file in a directory -- one per job, automatically 
named -- rather than sending it out as e-mail. Or just not to keep 
it at all. (This could still be overridden with -m, of course.) In 
short, I'm looking for the sort of flexibility that's already built 
into periodic.conf, which allows you to specify whether output is 
mailed, sent to a file, or sent to /dev/null by default. This would 
be useful for lots of applications, and especially for embedded work.


--Brett

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"at" command and mail

2011-09-03 Thread Brett Glass
I'm setting up a FreeBSD appliance that won't be running a mail 
daemon. I'd like the at(8) command to be there for scheduling of 
commands, but do not see any way to prevent it from trying to send 
mail after it executes a command. (There's not even a command line 
option that says "do not mail," or at least I can't find one.) Am I 
missing something, or does at(8) always expect to be able to send 
mail? If so, would it be worth implementing an atrun.conf 
configuration file that makes it optional and possibly sets other 
defaults for at(8)?


--Brett Glass

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Re: Turn off hyperthreading on dual core Atom?

2011-08-29 Thread Brett Glass

At 01:55 PM 8/29/2011, Bruce Cran wrote:

Actually, the ULE scheduler does know about HyperThreading and the 
topology of such CPUs. I don't know what it does with the 
information, but it probably works to optimize cache usage etc.


Alas, during a recent kernel build, I used the -j2 command line 
option in "make" and watched as the scheduler repeatedly assigned 
two instances of cc (the most CPU-intensive program) to the same core.


During that process, I also watched CPU utilization in top(1). The 
peak was 46% idle, which means that HTT appeared to be making at 
most a 4% difference. (If the peak were 50% idle, HTT would be 
doing nothing at all, because top(1) can't tell that there aren't 
really 4 CPUs.)


--Brett Glass

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Turn off hyperthreading on dual core Atom?

2011-08-29 Thread Brett Glass
I'm building a few systems using dual core Atom processors, and 
have noted that when the system boots up it says it has four CPUs: 
2 actual cores and 2 virtual ones. But performance is a bit 
unsteady, and I'm wondering if it's going to be better to turn 
hyperthreading off.


With hyperthreading, the FreeBSD scheduler simply acts as if there 
are 4 CPUs. Each "CPU" gets clock interrupts (which add overhead), 
and the scheduler is naive about the fact that two of the "CPUs" 
are not separate chips and could be held up if its mate has a heavy 
load. I do not know if the supposed higher utilization of the 
resources on each chip (including executing one thread while the 
CPU waits for data for another) is worth it. What has your experience been?


--Brett Glass

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Re: System hanging, error messages with USB drive on FreeBSD 8.1

2011-08-28 Thread Brett Glass
At 11:43 PM 8/27/2011, Polytropon wrote:
 
>I'm not sure if this will help you, but I also had similar
>problems with a Kingston USB stick (normal storage stick,
>no removable microSD card). It didn't work on any of my
>FreeBSD systems. So I finally returned it to the shop and
>got a Sony USB stick instead - no problems, works fine.
>
>So this is my assumption: Some hardware vendors maybe
>improperly implement the USB protocol in their devices,

A Web search reveals that there are dozens which apparently 
have problems with FreeBSD, while Windows has problems with
none of them. This leads me to believe that the problem is 
in FreeBSD, not the hardware.

USB mass storage devices are, for some reason, handled by
FreeBSD's SCSI/CAM subsystem, which seems to want to treat a
USB storage device (a memory stick or a memory card in an
adapter) as a full-out SCSI device when it is not. The
SCSI commands which fail usually have to do with flushing
the cache and/or other functions which just don't apply to
a USB stick. It looks as if the devices which do not have
trouble are just IGNORING the SCSI commands, not executing 
them. In short, FreeBSD really should not be trying to 
issue them in the first place.

In short, this shouldn't be something that's handled by
"quirks." Instead, the system simply should recognize that
a USB memory stick is not a SCSI drive.

--Brett Glass

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System hanging, error messages with USB drive on FreeBSD 8.1

2011-08-27 Thread Brett Glass
I'm working with a FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE/amd64 machine that's 
attempting to write data to an ordinary Kingston 8 GB microSD card. 
The card has been inserted into its USB adapter and plugged into a 
USB port on the machine. The system is locking up repeatedly with 
messages that say


(da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SYNCHRONIZE CACHE(10). CDB: 35 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
(da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: Error code 0x52

A Web search reveals that problems like this have cropped up for 
many, many FreeBSD users as far back as 4.x. But I can't seem to 
find any solution (which amazes me; if there's a bug, one would 
think it would have gotten some attention). Do I have to abandon 
the use of FreeBSD with USB thumb drives (or maybe with USB 
altogether)? Hope not, but I may have to if I can't get this fixed.


--Brett Glass

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Last Stacker patent expires May 14th

2011-04-03 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

The last of the Stac data compression patents, granted in 1991, 
expires on May 14th of this year. For a long time, all 
implementations of PPP for FreeBSD have had stubs for the Stac 
compression methods (in particular, MPPC; see, for example, 
/sys/netgraph/mppc.c) and there's now absolutely no reason for them 
to do so anymore. (Linux, in fact, has jumped the gun and has 
compression code available.) Shall we start coding?


--Brett Glass

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Re: Realtek 8111C support?

2010-11-18 Thread Brett Glass
Thank you. Neither the 8.1 release notes nor the man page mentions 
the chip. They both should.


--Brett Glass

At 11:46 AM 11/18/2010, Adam Vande More wrote:

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Brett Glass 
<<mailto:br...@lariat.net>br...@lariat.net> wrote:

Does FreeBSD 8.1 have support for the Realtek 8111C GigE adapter chip?


Yes, it's in re(4) -- RTL8168/8111/8111c.

The man page doesn't seem to specifically address it but it does 
work fine.  I'm running stable on the box with these chips now but 
I'm pretty sure 8.1 RELEASE was on here at one point and ran fine.


--
Adam Vande More


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Realtek 8111C support?

2010-11-18 Thread Brett Glass

Does FreeBSD 8.1 have support for the Realtek 8111C GigE adapter chip?

--Brett Glass

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Driver support for Supereal SR9600 USB-to-Ethernet chip?

2010-04-03 Thread Brett Glass
I just received a handful of USB Ethernet NICs whose primary chip 
says "SUPEREAL" on it. I've installed one on a Windows machine, and 
the computer identifies it as having the Supereal SR9600 chip on 
it. Is there support for this chip in FreeBSD?


--Brett Glass

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Re: CF Ethernet for FreeBSD?

2009-11-30 Thread Brett Glass

At 05:13 PM 11/30/2009, Olivier Nicole wrote:


Not to mentione FreeBSD drivers, but only finding an Ethernet
interface that plugs into a CF sockets seems very chalenging: you
don't really send/receive the same information to memory and to
network interface; CF can address GB of data, while the network card
has a few KB at best; etc.


CF sockets usually can act as sockets for ATA/IDE compatible disk 
drives as well as for PCMCIA-like peripheral cards.


Also, there are some Ethernet interface chips that are designed to 
be memory-mapped. See, for example, the one by ASIX, which is often 
used in embedded systems because it can interface with pretty much any CPU.


--Brett Glass

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CF Ethernet for FreeBSD?

2009-11-30 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

I'm working on an embedded system which will be using a small Intel 
Atom motherboard with a single Ethernet port. The problem is, some 
configurations of the system are going to need two Ethernet ports, 
and only available ports on the system are a few USB slots and a CF 
(CompactFlash) socket.


FreeBSD has drivers for several types of USB-to-Ethernet 
converters, but USB is a pretty inefficient way of doing Ethernet. 
So, I'm interested in finding out if anyone knows of an Ethernet 
interface which will plug into the CF socket and has drivers for 
FreeBSD. Please let me know; any help would be MUCH appreciated!


--Brett Glass

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What does this message mean?

2009-11-28 Thread Brett Glass

Just installed mpd5 to experiment with it, and got the following error message
on the next boot:

WARNING: attempt to domain_add(netgraph) after domainfinalize()

What does this mean? Does it signal a serious problem?

--Brett Glass

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HTT on Atom (Was: FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset)

2009-11-26 Thread Brett Glass

At 04:33 PM 11/26/2009, Manolis Kiagias wrote:


Though it seems hyperthreading is improved on the Atom and there is no
penalty for leaving it on.


Is there really no penalty? With HZ=1000 there are double the clock 
interrupts to be serviced at least. And as I understand it the Atom 
has less redundant hardware, so there are less likely to be unused 
resources available to the second thread. I am seeing substantially 
faster compiles with the SMP option commented out of the kernel.


--Brett



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Re: FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset

2009-11-26 Thread Brett Glass

At 08:28 AM 11/26/2009, Warren Block wrote:


Hard to tell.  Is it possible it's just disabled?


There's no switch to disable the wireless on the Eee Box. Also, the 
wireless did work with Linux just before I installed FreeBSD. So, I 
do not think the problem is that the wireless is disabled. I think 
that no FreeBSD driver is recognizing the card. (More below.)


Only the Asus Eee laptops, not the desktops, are listed in the Wiki 
(Why?). But the two lines are very similar and in some cases use 
the same motherboards, just populated differently. The LAN 
interface is identified by the kernel as one of the Realtek gigabit 
chips. The PCI chip ID is 0x816810EC, which sure enough is listed 
in the PCI database at http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/10ec as a 
RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller. The re(4) 
driver runs it correctly.


There's something funny, though not fatal, going on with ACPI, 
though. At boot time, I get a warning from the FreeBSD acpi driver:


ACPI Warning: Option field Pm2ControlBlock has zero address or length...

However, the machine still boots. And hyperthreading is enabled, 
because the Atom has HTT. (I have been thinking of disabling it, 
because hyperthreading may not work very well on the Atom. Does 
anyone know how to do this properly? I tried setting 
machdep.hlt_logical_cpus to 1 in /boot/loader.conf and was rewarded 
with a system crash at boot time.)


I thought the wireless on/off switches were soft switches, but 
maybe not on that model.  If you can get Linux to identify the 
exact model of card, along with the model of computer, that would be helpful.


I wiped Linux off the box when I installed FreeBSD. But the model 
number of the computer is B202 -- a desktop micro-workstation. It 
uses the Atom N270 CPU and comes with a 160 GB hard drive and 1 GB 
of RAM. The FCC label on the outside of the box mentions two 
AzureWave mini-PCI wireless cards: the AW-NE766 (FCC ID: 
VQF-RT2700E; IC: 7542A-RT2700E) and the AW-NE771 (FCC ID: 
PPD-AR5891; IC: 4104A-AR5891). The second one clearly uses an 
Atheros chipset, but the first incorporates what looks like a 
Ralink part number. And sure enough, the pciconf -l command lists 
the wireless interface's PCI chip ID as 0x07811814. According to 
the PCI database at http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/1814 this makes 
it a Ralink RT2860 chip. The card ID is 0x27901814, which has the 
same least significant word so it would again be a Ralink (probably 
just rebranded by AzureWave).


FreeBSD has a driver that says it works on the Ralink 2560 and 2661 
but not later chips. So, what we probably have here is a recent 
model Ralink b/g/n wireless card that's too new for the driver to 
recognize. Linux is ahead of us.


A brief Web search indicates that Ralink has apparently released 
firmware for the RT28xx chips under a BSD-like license. However, I 
don't know if the ral(4) driver would handle the interface properly 
if I got a copy of that firmware, hacked /sys/dev/ral/if_ral_pci.c 
to upload it, and then told it to treat the chip as if it were a 
2661. Does anyone know if this has a chance of working?


--Brett

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Re: FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset

2009-11-25 Thread Brett Glass
> Dead as in doesn't show in dmesg/pciconf

Yep, that's correct. The only hint of it is the following message:

pci3:  at device 0.0 (no driver attached)

--Brett

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FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset

2009-11-25 Thread Brett Glass
Just tried installing FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE on an Eee PC, and it works
pretty well -- except for the wireless interface, which is dead, dead,
dead. It's an Atheros "AzureWave" chipset, and it did work with the
included Linux distro before I wiped the disk and installed FreeBSD.
Any ideas as to how I can get it working with FreeBSD 8.0?

--Brett Glass
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Re: kern.polling.lost_polls

2009-11-20 Thread Brett Glass

At 06:25 PM 11/20/2009, Mel Flynn wrote:


So that means that you give the kernel .25 microseconds to poll and act on
any pending network IO. That's probably not enough.


I think that you mean ".25 milliseconds," not ".25 microseconds," above.


It is further explained by
the
comment in sys/kern/kern_poll.c:
/*
 * Hook from hardclock. Tries to schedule a netisr, but keeps track
 * of lost ticks due to the previous handler taking too long.
 * Normally, this should not happen, because polling handler should
 * run for a short time. However, in some cases (e.g. when there are
 * changes in link status etc.) the drivers take a very long time
 * (even in the order of milliseconds) to reset and reconfigure the
 * device, causing apparent lost polls.
 *
 * The first part of the code is just for debugging purposes, and tries
 * to count how often hardclock ticks are shorter than they should,
 * meaning either stray interrupts or delayed events.
 */


Well, even at HZ=2000, kern.polling.lost_polls and 
kern.polling.suspect are both incrementing, as is kern.polling.stalled:


stargate# sysctl -a | grep polling
kern.polling.burst: 150
kern.polling.burst_max: 150
kern.polling.each_burst: 5
kern.polling.idle_poll: 0
kern.polling.user_frac: 50
kern.polling.reg_frac: 20
kern.polling.short_ticks: 0
kern.polling.lost_polls: 41229
kern.polling.pending_polls: 0
kern.polling.residual_burst: 0
kern.polling.handlers: 2
kern.polling.enable: 0
kern.polling.phase: 0
kern.polling.suspect: 31653
kern.polling.stalled: 10
kern.polling.idlepoll_sleeping: 1
hw.acpi.thermal.polling_rate: 10

But if I slow the clock down to 1000 Hz, it's unclear if the 
machine will be able to keep up with traffic. I was already getting 
more than 1,000 network interrupts per second before I tried 
polling, and I'm not sure how many packets the interfaces (some 
fxp, some em) can buffer up. I'm going to try it, but if it doesn't 
work I will have to go back to interrupt-driven operation.


--Brett Glass

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kern.polling.lost_polls

2009-11-20 Thread Brett Glass
Everyone:

I've been experimenting with using device polling on a router with six Ethernet
interfaces that handles lots of traffic. I turned polling on, and set HZ=4000
to minimize latency and ensure that enough time was allocated to handle all of
the incoming packets. But the sysctl variable kernel.polling.lost_polls keeps
incrementing! The documentation of this variable isn't very good, so I am not
sure what this means. Does it mean that I should set kern.hz lower (perhaps
to 2000) and kern.polling.burst_max higher? Or that running the interfaces
in interrupt-driven mode would be more effective? How can I tell? (Feel free
to ask for more information about the hardware or kernel config if it would
help you to provide a good answer.)

--Brett Glass
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Date/time formats in ps

2009-11-18 Thread Brett Glass
I'm looking at the man page for the "ps" command -- specifically at 
the part involving the date and time format for the "start" output 
field -- and am scratching my head. It says that the default format 
string for the date and time when a task was started, if it was 
started within the past 24 hours, is "%l:ps.1p". But to me, it 
looks as if the correct format is "%l:%M%p". Is the man page wrong, 
or am I missing something here?


--Brett Glass

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State of interface polling in FreeBSD

2009-11-17 Thread Brett Glass
I'm building a FreeBSD router based on a small, Intel Atom-based 
board and am trying to decide whether or not to configure the 
kernel for polling. What's the current state of interface polling 
in FreeBSD? Is it worth doing with a single CPU, or will it 
actually increase system overhead? What "HZ" settings are recommended?


--Brett Glass

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Re: Why is sendmail is part of the system and not a package?

2009-10-30 Thread Brett Glass

At 02:50 AM 10/30/2009, Randi Harper wrote:


This bikeshed is old and tired. I don't want to paint it. I want to drown it
in lighter fluid and set it on fire.


I've never seen a bike shed. Unless perhaps it had a furry seat cover.

--Brett Glass

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Re: IPFW in-kernel NAT: How to compile?

2009-02-01 Thread Brett Glass

At 08:41 PM 2/1/2009, Dan Nelson wrote:


LINT was removed back in 2000 and replaced with NOTES, since that better
describes what it's really used for.  IPFIREWALL_NAT and LIBALIAS should
additionally be documented in ipfw(4) imho.


Indeed they should. I'm not a committer, or I'd add the information.

--Brett Glass

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Re: IPFW in-kernel NAT: How to compile?

2009-02-01 Thread Brett Glass

At 05:43 PM 2/1/2009, Dan Nelson wrote:


Do you have "options LIBALIAS" in your kernel config?


Nope. There was nothing that said that such an option was needed 
(or even that it existed). I did find it, via a recursive grep, in 
a file labeled "NOTES" a couple of levels up in the directory 
hierarchy. I'm trying a compile now to see if that's all that's 
needed to fix the problem.


It looks as if there's no longer one easy place to find out how to 
configure a kernel. The options used to all be in a LINT file that 
was present in the configuration directory No more.


--Brett





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IPFW in-kernel NAT: How to compile?

2009-02-01 Thread Brett Glass

All:

I'm building a machine using FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE, and noticed that 
there was now a kernel configuration option to enable in-kernel NAT 
in IPFW. So, starting with a pristine system, I tried to rebuild 
the kernel with this feature as I trimmed out the unneeded device 
drivers. But the build failed -- and the error messages suggest 
that the problem had to do with linking libalias into the kernel.


libalias seems to be there, so I'm not sure what's wrong. Ideas?

--Brett Glass

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Status of hyperthreading in FreeBSD

2008-12-20 Thread Brett Glass
"Netbooks" based on Intel's "Atom" microprocessor are turning into 
big hits this Christmas season. The Atom, a super-low-power x86 
processor, is an "in-order" machine, which means that except for a 
few special cases it can spend a lot of time waiting for data to 
arrive when it encounters a cache miss. So, hyperthreading may make 
sense on this kind of processor as compared to one with out-of-order execution.


Which raises a question: What's the status of FreeBSD's support for 
hyperthreading? As far as I know, after it was revealed that some 
processes on a machine with hyperthreading could "spy" on others, 
and also that hyperthreading didn't always improve performance on 
high end processors, the feature was turned off by default. But on 
single-user machines, or on servers where the CPU was likely to be 
shared by two processes that were both privileged anyway, it might 
make sense to re-enable it. But has this feature of the scheduler 
been maintained well enough for this to be a good idea? If not, 
would it worth looking into updating it so that FreeBSD runs well on the Atom?


--Brett Glass

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Secondary DNS or BSD Server space

2008-12-18 Thread Brett Glass

Everyone:

We just got word that Neustar, which bought DNS service provider 
Nominum a few years ago,  is shutting down Nominum's 
"secondary.com" service. The service used to provide secondary DNS 
for users' zones at no charge.


I and the other secondary.com users I know think it's reasonable 
for the company to charge a small but reasonable fee for the 
service instead of keeping it running for free. But alas, Neustar 
is getting greedy. The only alternative they offer is a $50-a-month 
"managed DNS" service, which we don't want or need. (We're fine 
maintaining our own master servers and zones; we just need a slave 
to use as a secondary.) So, we're looking for alternatives.


Does anyone on this list know of a good, BSD-based service which 
offers reasonably priced secondary DNS? Or reasonably priced 
servers at a server farm, where I and others can set up a secondary DNS server?


--Brett Glass

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Re: Wine compatibility and performance on FreeBSD 7

2007-12-10 Thread Brett Glass
It's worth noting that the WINE project, not long ago, abandoned
the BSD license for the GPL despite urging from many sources to keep
the code open and free for use by developers. We've stopped using it
as a result.

--Brett Glass

At 10:59 AM 12/6/2007, Tom Wickline wrote:
 
>Oh yea, were seeking contributors... if your interested in Wine on
>FreeBSD and believe you can
>help us out see :
>http://wine-review.blogspot.com/2007/12/wine-review-is-currently-seeking.html

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Support for Realtek 8187-based USB Wi-Fi adapters?

2007-11-30 Thread Brett Glass
Is there a FreeBSD driver for USB Wi-Fi adapters based on
the Realtek 8187 chip? Many vendors, including TrendNET,
are coming out with USB adapters based on it.

--Brett Glass
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Inverse ARP query

2007-05-11 Thread Brett Glass
Is there a command in FreeBSD that can be used to do an inverse ARP
query (that is, supply a MAC address and have the device respond
with its IP)? I have several hardware devices here whose IP addresses
I do not know, but their MAC addresses are printed on the labels.
To reprogram and reset them, I need their IPs so that I can get into
them via a telnet or Web interrace. I could scan for the devices'
addresses, but this would take months. But if they respond to
inverse ARP queries, I can find out in an instant what their
IP addresses are.

--Brett Glass
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Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel

2007-04-14 Thread Brett Glass
At 10:01 AM 4/14/2007, Colin Percival wrote:
 
>GPL/CDDL taint doesn't cross dynamic linking.

Richard Stallman claims it does. The proposed Version 3 of the GPL makes it 
even more explicit. 

--Brett Glass

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Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel

2007-04-14 Thread Brett Glass
At 12:27 PM 4/14/2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
>No, you are not.  Because it appears that the whole thing is not covered
>by the CDDL.

Read the license. If you distribute a product that includes the code, you are 
bound by the obligations listed in the license (to distribute source code, not 
ever to patent anything, to give up firstborn children, etc.). So, FreeBSD is 
covered by the license. You can't use it freely. It is no longer free.

--Brett Glass

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Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel

2007-04-14 Thread Brett Glass

At 10:55 AM 4/14/2007, Philipp Wuensche wrote:


Example:
You create a binary from two source files.

1. one BSD one CDDL. If you distribute this binary, you have to provide
the CDDL part (and all modifications to it) as source under CDDL
license. You are not required to provide the source of the BSD part.


Yes, you are. Because it appears that the whole thing is now covered
by the CDDL.

--Brett Glass

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Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel

2007-04-14 Thread Brett Glass
At 10:12 AM 4/14/2007, Bill Moran wrote:
 
>How is this any worse than the GPLed stuff in /usr/src/contrib?

It's in the kernel. And the announcement went as far as to say that
it is "part of FreeBSD."

--Brett

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Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel

2007-04-14 Thread Brett Glass
There is a huge problem in that the CDDL is "viral." It "infects"
products with which it is combined. You can read the text of the
CDDL at

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php

Section 3.1 of the CDDL is the portion which is essentially equivalent
to the GPL. 

This is part of the nastiness of viral licenses.

--Brett Glass

At 07:06 AM 4/14/2007, Philipp Wuensche wrote:
 
>Brett Glass wrote:
>> I just read with some concern the announcement that Sun's ZFS has been
>> integrated into the FreeBSD kernel. This would mean, unfortunately, that
>> FreeBSD is now covered by the CDDL, which is a viral license similar to
>> the GPL. Has FreeBSD abandoned its longstanding practice of keeping the
>> kernel truly free?
>
>Maybe this blog entry brings some light:
>http://blogs.sun.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated
>
>I don't see a problem. If you use CDDL licensed stuff like ZFS, you need
>to provide the source, thats it.
>
>greetigns,
>philipp

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Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel

2007-04-13 Thread Brett Glass
I just read with some concern the announcement that Sun's ZFS has 
been integrated into the FreeBSD kernel. This would mean, 
unfortunately, that FreeBSD is now covered by the CDDL, which is a 
viral license similar to the GPL. Has FreeBSD abandoned its 
longstanding practice of keeping the kernel truly free?


--Brett Glass

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Upgrade from 4.x -> 6.2: Old file systems?

2007-03-23 Thread Brett Glass
I have a server which I am considering upgrading from 4.11 to 6.2. 
Besides the operating system disk (which contains all of the 
expected partitions such as /, /usr, /var, and /tmp), There's a 
large data disk on the system containing useful data that I'd like 
to put back online as soon as the upgrade is completed. I'd rather 
not have to reformat it unless there is a significant advantage to 
doing so. Does 6.2 work properly with the older disk format? Is 
there any reason to take the time and effort to back up the data 
and restore it to the new format? Is there anything I'll need to be 
careful about if I upgrade just the system disk?


--Brett Glass

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Re: DST on very old FreeBSD system

2007-03-10 Thread Brett Glass
John:

/etc/localtime on the 2.2.8 system begins with a series of nulls, 
not the string "TZif". However, some of our other clients have
4.x systems whose /etc/localtime files do begin with "TZif".
If you could send or post the files for the MST7MDT zone in both
formats, it'd be a great help.

It'd be nice if administrators could just download the relevant 
files and drop them into /etc/localtime. Perhaps someone with the 
power to do so could upload the zones in both formats to directories
on ftp.freebsd.org, so folks could bring in the zone(s) they needed 
via the "fetch" program.

--Brett Glass

At 02:27 PM 3/10/2007, John Levine wrote:
 
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you write:
>>I've been asked to update a very old FreeBSD system -- an embedded
>>system that's chugging along happily on FreeBSD 2.2.8 -- to handle
>>the new start and stop dates for Daylight Savings Time.
>
>I just updated my antique BSDI 4.3 systems, and it turned out to take
>about five minutes.
>
>See if your system has the zic time zone compiler installed, probably
>in /usr/sbin or some place like that.  If so, pick up the new source
>file /usr/src/share/zoneinfo/northamerica from a current fbsd system,
>become superuser, and run it through zic.  It should automatically
>install all of the updated files in the right place.
>
>If you can't find a copy of zic, you'll need to figure out whether
>that version of fbsd uses the old or new timezone format.  The old
>format starts with a bunch of binary zeros, the new format with
>the string TZif.
>
>If it uses the new format, just copy the timezone files from any other
>fbsd system.  If it uses the old format, drop me a line privately and
>I'll send you the files from a bsdi box.
>
>R's,
>John

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DST on very old FreeBSD system

2007-03-10 Thread Brett Glass
I've been asked to update a very old FreeBSD system -- an embedded
system that's chugging along happily on FreeBSD 2.2.8 -- to handle
the new start and stop dates for Daylight Savings Time. There's no
need to update the OS on the system, because it is firewalled from
the Internet and runs the embedded hardware it has to run just fine.
But it does need the clock to be right to perform scheduled tasks.

If I simply copy /etc/localtime from a FreeBSD 6.1 system to that
one, will it work? Or has the time zone file format changed at all?
(I seem to recall that it was fixed by POSIX, but I don't know if
versions of FreeBSD that old are POSIX-compliant.)

--Brett Glass
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Re: nfsiod

2006-10-31 Thread Brett Glass
On my system, sysctl(8) shows that vfs.nfs.iodmin is 4. And this
is out of the box on a fresh install of 6.1 in which I told
sysinstall that I wanted no NFS. Sounds like a bug. Now that you've
explained where the knobs are, I see that I can work around it 
via lines in /boot/loader.conf, which can set sysctl variables
at the time when the kernel is loaded. But the bug should be 
addressed in 6.2. If you're not running NFS, you don't need NFS-
related processes laying around.

--Brett Glass

At 02:42 PM 10/31/2006, Dan Nelson wrote:
 

>In the last episode (Oct 31), Brett Glass said:
>> I have no interest in running NFS (AKA "no file security") on my 
>> FreeBSD boxes, but have  noticed that FreeBSD 6.x seems to start a 
>> daemon called "nfsiod" by default even when it is not configured as 
>> an NFS server or client. What's the best way to instruct the system 
>> not to start these processes, which take up resources and may be a 
>> security risk? Why isn't this done at sysinstall time?
>
>nfsiods are kernel threads that allow for parallel client requests from
>a machine.  You must still have some sort of NFS client functionality
>in the kernel for them to exist, but you can tell them to quit by
>setting the vfs.nfs.iodmax sysctl to 0.  They should exit imediately. 
>In fact, since iodmin defaults to zero, there shouldn't be any running
>unless you are actively using nfs.
>
>-- 
>Dan Nelson
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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nfsiod

2006-10-31 Thread Brett Glass
I have no interest in running NFS (AKA "no file security") on my 
FreeBSD boxes, but have  noticed that FreeBSD 6.x seems to start a 
daemon called "nfsiod" by default even when it is not configured as 
an NFS server or client. What's the best way to instruct the system 
not to start these processes, which take up resources and may be a 
security risk? Why isn't this done at sysinstall time?


--Brett Glass

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Best way to "renice" a process by name?

2006-09-26 Thread Brett Glass
I'm working with a machine that's operating as a NAT router and 
recursive DNS resolver and is also running the Squid disk cache. 
Squid, in turn, spawns the "diskd" daemon, which does disk accesses 
on behalf of Squid. When Squid spawns diskd, it gives it a priority 
level 6 greater than itself. In other words, if Squid is launched 
normally, it gets a priority of 2 (normal) while diskd gets a 
priority of -4 (very high).


Unfortunately, diskd is not an efficient user of CPU (it seems to 
be polling for I/O completion) and is starving other processes on 
the machine (for example, natd) which need to operate in near real time.


I'd like to keep diskd running on that machine, because having disk 
access done by a separate process is very efficient -- even more so 
if the system uses SMP. But I need to re-prioritize Squid and diskd 
to keep the rest of the machine functional. In particular, I'd like 
to nice Squid down by 1 (so that natd and named have priority over 
it) and have diskd run at standard priority (so that it can't 
starve other processes). This will keep diskd at a higher priority 
than Squid itself, which in turn will hopefully prevent message 
queues from overflowing.


Reducing Squid's priority is simple; I can just edit the script 
that starts Squid so that /usr/bin/nice is used to invoke it. But 
taming diskd is more difficult, because diskd is a child process of 
Squid. I have to make sure it has started (which may require a 
delay loop), find out its PID, and then "renice" it by whatever 
increment is required to get it to the system's standard priority 
(2 by convention). Is there a "renice by name" utility for FreeBSD 
(sort of an equivalent of "killall")? I could gin one up, but since 
this seems like something that people would want to do frequently, 
find it hard to believe that someone hasn't already written one.


--Brett Glass

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Best gigabit network interface for FreeBSD?

2006-09-03 Thread Brett Glass
Was going to post this to net@, but figured I'd get a bigger 
audience and better answers on this list. (Please copy responses to 
me as well as the list to make sure I see them.)


I'm building a machine which is going to have very high network 
loads, but can't really use a TCP/IP "accelerator" because much of 
the traffic won't be TCP. What, as of now, is the most capable 
gigabit Ethernet interface for FreeBSD? Which has the cleanest, 
simplest driver? The most onboard buffer space to prevent overruns 
and underruns? The fastest bus interface? The least interrupt 
overhead (important because interrupts in FreeBSD 6.x are 
relatively expensive)? I have some Intel "em" interfaces available 
to me, but have been told that while the driver is well supported 
they are quirky and not the best choice.


--Brett Glass

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Re: "Hostile" vs. "Friendly" instances of Sendmail

2006-08-25 Thread Brett Glass
At 02:32 PM 8/25/2006, Chuck Swiger wrote:
 
>You should consider configuring a firewall to limit the number of  
>incoming SMTP connections permitted to something less than the max  
>number of sendmail processes you want to run in parallel, so internal  
>users will always have some sendmail instances available to service  
>their requests.

I've been looking at an IPFW "limit" rule to do this. The only issue
here is that turning on "statefulness" in IPFW introduces extra
overhead, and the last time I tried a "limit" rule (admittedly, it
was in FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x), it didn't seem to work correctly.
Besides, I want to do more than set a connection limit.

>You could also configure an external and an internal mailservers,  

That's sort of the idea. But I'd do it on one machine. And the
advantage would be that I could have very different Sendmail 
options (not just connection limits) on the internal and external
server processes. For example, the external one could have REALLY 
heavy safeguards against spam. 

>There is no issue with setting up as many additional queue groups and  
>queue runners as you need to; 

I don't want to set up many queue groups and queue runners,
necessarily. I really just want two SMTP servers: inward-facing,
for outgoing mail, and outward-facing, for incoming mail. If
the messages dropped into a single queue for delivery, that 
would be OK; I just want the SMTP server that faces internal
clients to have different settings than the one that faces the
slime pit known as the Internet. ;-)

>>And where's the option that tells Sendmail to listen only on a  
>>particular interface? (This should be on the man page, but isn't.)
>
>The complete docs for sendmail don't really fit into even the 1044  
>page O'Reilly book; surely you jest if you expect to find complete  
>docs within the manpage.

I don't. But the man page for ANY daemon should always include certain
basic things, such as a list of the command line arguments and options; 
information on how to get it to listen on a specific address, port, or
interface; and how it responds to signals. Other things can be in
other documentation, but these are essential in the man page for a
daemon, IMHO.

--Brett Glass

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"Hostile" vs. "Friendly" instances of Sendmail

2006-08-25 Thread Brett Glass
A company for whom I do consulting has a FreeBSD mail server. 
Because they're being deluged with connections from spammers (who 
have responded to the increasing use of "graylisting" by ordering 
their armies of bots to try again and again even when spam is 
rejected), they've subscribed to some DNS blacklists and set 
Sendmail to limit the number of processes it can spawn at any one 
time. This reduces the load on the system due to spamming, but also 
prevents internal users from getting the mail server's attention 
when they want to send legitimate outgoing mail.


What's the best way to set things up so that more trusted, internal 
users can access their own instance of Sendmail (with less 
restrictive process limits, no blacklist checks, etc.) while the 
outside world sees an instance of Sendmail with blacklisting, 
process limits, connection limits, load limits, etc.? Will there be 
problems with file locking, queues, etc. if a third instance of 
Sendmail is started on a standard FreeBSD install (which normally 
runs two)? And where's the option that tells Sendmail to listen 
only on a particular interface? (This should be on the man page, but isn't.)


--Brett Glass

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Increasing socket send buffer size

2006-08-21 Thread Brett Glass
I'm working with a system in which a program is failing because it 
sometimes tries to write more data to a stream socket than will 
fit. It reports that it can't write to the socket because it's out 
of buffer space, then dies ungracefully.


What's the best solution to this problem? The only tunable I can 
find that seems to address this issue is kern.ipc.maxsockbuf, which 
seems to set an absolute ceiling on the size of a socket's buffers.


--Brett Glass

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Strange errors from BIND on FreeBSD 4.x system

2006-07-05 Thread Brett Glass
I'm working with a client's FreeBSD system (4.9 with patches) which 
is having trouble resolving certain domains but not others. When I 
try to execute the same queries using "dig", I see the error message


res_nsend: Protocol not supported

Via various search engines, I've seen hints that the problem may 
have something to do with IPV6 but no instructions as to how to 
resolve it. Can anyone explain what's wrong and how to fix it?


--Brett Glass

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Re: Internal DSL modems for FreeBSD?

2006-02-27 Thread Brett Glass

If they're like "Winmodems," will the NDIS shim help? "Winmodems" do
all sorts of special real time stuff.

--Brett

At 06:10 PM 2/27/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Why not try and purchase one and use NDIS which is a way to run windows
drivers in FreeBSD as i think internal modem are a bit like WinModems they
are software type.

Regards,
Chris
> On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 13:30 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
>> At 05:54 AM 2/27/2006, robert wrote:
>>
>> >On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 12:30 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
>> >> What internal DMT ADSL modems are supported by FreeBSD? I am
>> >> looking for internal modems rather than external ones, because the
>> >> link requires redundancy and I'd like FreeBSD to do multilink PPP
>> >> over two of them.
>> >>
>> >> --Brett Glass
>> >
>> >Brett,
>> >
>> >Have you tried the release hardware notes:
>> >
>> >http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-i386.html
>> >
>> >Rob
>>
>> Yes. And there are no ADSL modems listed there at all, which
>> is quite surprising to me.
>>
>> --Brett Glass
>
> Hmm you are right or they are well hidden. I see some usb ones there
> though.
>
> Anybody else?
>
> Rob
>
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Re: Internal DSL modems for FreeBSD?

2006-02-27 Thread Brett Glass
At 05:54 AM 2/27/2006, robert wrote:
 
>On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 12:30 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
>> What internal DMT ADSL modems are supported by FreeBSD? I am 
>> looking for internal modems rather than external ones, because the 
>> link requires redundancy and I'd like FreeBSD to do multilink PPP 
>> over two of them.
>> 
>> --Brett Glass
>
>Brett,
>
>Have you tried the release hardware notes:
>
>http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-i386.html
>
>Rob

Yes. And there are no ADSL modems listed there at all, which
is quite surprising to me. 

--Brett Glass

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Internal DSL modems for FreeBSD?

2006-02-27 Thread Brett Glass
What internal DMT ADSL modems are supported by FreeBSD? I am 
looking for internal modems rather than external ones, because the 
link requires redundancy and I'd like FreeBSD to do multilink PPP 
over two of them.


--Brett Glass

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Sendmail X port

2005-12-27 Thread Brett Glass
I don't see Sendmail X available as a port or package. I'm interested in trying
this version because it's the first to eliminate the horribly cryptic system of
m4 macros, "classes", and address parsing rules that configured earlier 
versions.
Is there a reason why it's not available as a package or port for FreeBSD?

--Brett Glass
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RE: Has this box been hacked?

2005-07-10 Thread Brett Glass
The person who set the system up did not leave on bad terms.
However, before taking the system down and setting it up
from scratch (and charging them to do so) I'd like to know
if anyone is aware of whether what I saw is common on boxes
that have been rooted. Is that "shutdown" entry cause for
concern? Is there a way in which it could have happened
innocently (e.g. due to a power failure that left the disk
inconsistent)?

--Brett Glass

At 02:31 AM 7/10/2005, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
  

>When I am in that same position as a rule I tell the customer
>that I would assume the system was rooted.
>
>The reason is that all of the times I've been called in on
>this type of job it has been because the previous admin was
>fired and they wanted to make sure he wasn't getting back
>in remotely and causing problems.
>
>You didn't say the circumstances behind this job of yours, but
>clearly, since this is a FreeBSD 4.11 system it's been built
>within the last 6 months.  Now, the person that built it isn't
>around?  Otherwise why would they be callin you in?  You should
>assume the previous person that setup this system left some back
>doors.
>
>Ted

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Re: Has this box been hacked?

2005-07-08 Thread Brett Glass
At 05:32 PM 7/7/2005, J65nko BSD wrote:

>If you would have installed something like tripwire or  aide, you would have 
>been in a better position to find out whether the box has been owned. 

I didn't build the machine.

--Brett Glass

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RE: Has this box been hacked?

2005-07-08 Thread Brett Glass
Give ME a break. You're only stating the obvious: the more 
daemons are running, the more exposure. This particular box 
is running BIND 8, a transparent Squid proxy, and SSH. BIND
is sandboxed and Squid is running as a nonprivileged user.
Squid is also set not to take requests from outside. 

I wasn't the one who configured it; I've been asked to 
analyze it.

--Brett

At 11:56 PM 7/6/2005, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
  

>Sure, FreeBSD 4.11 is very easy for a remote attacker to root.
>All you need to do is let a user on it setup some convenient
>password like the word "password" for the root user, and use
>the same on an easy-to-remember userID
>like "sam" or "bob", then put a DNS entry in for it like
>"porno-pictures.example.com" and post that on a popular website
>and it shouldn't take but a few days for it to get rooted.
>
>Other than that, give me a break, Brett.  If this is a router and
>an out of the box install then there's no services turned on
>that can be rooted.  Is it customary to run a webserver on your
>router nowadays?
>
>Give us a list of services this box is running and we can give
>you a better idea of how easy it might be to root.
>
>Ted
>
>>-Original Message-
>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Brett Glass
>>Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2005 9:42 AM
>>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>Subject: Has this box been hacked?
>>
>>
>>A client had a network problem, and I wanted to make sure that 
>>his FreeBSD 4.11 
>>router wasn't the cause of it, so I rebooted it. I then did a 
>>"last" command 
>>and saw the following:
>>
>>root ttyv0 Tue Jul  5 12:01 - 
>>12:05  (00:04)
>>adminttyp0localhostTue Jul  5 11:57 - 
>>11:57  (00:00)
>>root ttyv0 Tue Jul  5 11:49 - 
>>12:00  (00:11)
>>reboot   ~ Tue Jul  5 11:49
>>shutdown ~ Tue Jul  5 11:47
>>root ttyv0 Tue Jul  5 11:37 - 
>>shutdown  (00:10)
>>reboot   ~ Tue Jul  5 11:36
>>shutdown ~ Tue Jul  5 05:36
>>shutdown ~ Tue Jul  5 11:22
>>
>>Note the "shutdown" entry with the time 5:36 AM, which is odd 
>>because it's out of 
>>chronological order and the other logs don't show the typical 
>>debug messages
>>at that time. Where might such an entry come from? How likely 
>>is it that the box
>>has been rooted? Are there known exploits that might have been 
>>used to root a
>>FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE machine? (The only unusual activity I can 
>>see in the logs is a 
>>few attempts to log in as "root" via SSH. The attempts that 
>>were logged were
>>not successful, but of course a skilled attacker would cover 
>>his tracks.)
>>
>>--Brett 
>>
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Has this box been hacked?

2005-07-06 Thread Brett Glass
A client had a network problem, and I wanted to make sure that his FreeBSD 4.11 
router wasn't the cause of it, so I rebooted it. I then did a "last" command 
and saw the following:

root ttyv0 Tue Jul  5 12:01 - 12:05  (00:04)
adminttyp0localhostTue Jul  5 11:57 - 11:57  (00:00)
root ttyv0 Tue Jul  5 11:49 - 12:00  (00:11)
reboot   ~ Tue Jul  5 11:49
shutdown ~ Tue Jul  5 11:47
root ttyv0 Tue Jul  5 11:37 - shutdown  (00:10)
reboot   ~ Tue Jul  5 11:36
shutdown ~ Tue Jul  5 05:36
shutdown ~ Tue Jul  5 11:22

Note the "shutdown" entry with the time 5:36 AM, which is odd because it's out 
of 
chronological order and the other logs don't show the typical debug messages
at that time. Where might such an entry come from? How likely is it that the box
has been rooted? Are there known exploits that might have been used to root a
FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE machine? (The only unusual activity I can see in the logs 
is a 
few attempts to log in as "root" via SSH. The attempts that were logged were
not successful, but of course a skilled attacker would cover his tracks.)

--Brett 

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Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?

2005-06-27 Thread Brett Glass
At 06:48 PM 6/27/2005, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:

>The 1820a has hardware XOR while the 1820 is purely software

This server will be mirroring, so we wouldn't need XOR. It'd
be a big plus for RAID 5, though.

--Brett

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Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?

2005-06-27 Thread Brett Glass
At 06:34 PM 6/26/2005, Nikolas Britton wrote:
  
>Highpoint RocketRAID:
>1640:   4xSATA,PCI 32bit, 33MHz
>1810A: 4xSATA,PCI-X 64bit, 66/100/133Mhz
>1820A: 8xSATA,PCI-X 64bit, 66/100/133Mhz
>2220:   8xSATA-II,  PCI-X 64bit, 66/100/133Mhz
>
>With the exception of the 2220 all of the other cards do RAID 5 in
>software. For your needs just about any RAID card from anyone will do
>what you want. The main reason I recommended highpoint's raid cards
>this because the company fully supports FreeBSD 4.x / 5.x with drivers
>and CLI/GUI management programs.

That's great! We don't run GUIs on servers that run RAID (for obvious
reasons), but if they have a good CLI program it'll work well.

>For you hot-swapping needs look here for SATA cages:
>http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=GO&Range=1&bop=and&description=cage&srchInDesc=SATA

Anything that'll fit in a 17" relay rack?

--Brett

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Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?

2005-06-26 Thread Brett Glass
At 02:53 PM 6/26/2005, Björn König wrote:

>You don't need an additional controller necessarily, because you can set up a 
>RAID 1 with two single ATA hard disks. You'll find a small how-to at [1]. Even 
>most cheap ATA chipsets have hot-swap capabilities.
>
>[1] http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/
>
>I have good experiences with SATA PCI controllers from Highpoint.

Interesting. We are not using FreeBSD 5. in production, because
it seems as if 5-STABLE is only now reaching the level of stability we
have come to expect from FreeBSD. (It looks as if we might be able to stop
using 4-STABLE when 6.0-RELEASE or 6.1-RELEASE comes out, so long as the
TCP/IP stack is re-optimized and disk performance improves by then.) So,
we don't have the ability to use anything that's based on the GEOM subsystem.

Nonetheless, the Web page is intriguing. Will the GEOM RAID subsystem really 
allow the machine to run and/or boot from either drive? It looks as if the 
machine is instructed to do different stages of the boot from different 
drives, so I'm concerned that if either drive fails a reboot might fail.

The ata(4) man page mentions support for RAID 1 on Promise and Highpoint 
(Adaptec?) RAID controllers. These tend to be less expensive than brands 
like 3Ware (which I'd use for RAID5 but seems like overkill for RAID 1).
Have folks had good experience with these? Will they work on 4-STABLE?

--Brett

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Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?

2005-06-26 Thread Brett Glass
At 12:39 PM 6/26/2005, Mike Maltese wrote:
  
>Brett Glass wrote:
>>I need to set up a FreeBSD server with two or more sets of
>>mirrored drives. What is the best controller to use for this
>>purpose? Note that I don't need striping or other RAID
>>functions -- just mirroring, hopefully with hot swap capability.
>>A system that could re-mirror a replacement drive with minimal
>>impact on performance would be ideal.
>
>The 3ware 7000 series cards work great. Not sure about hot swap with IDE 
>though. I'd go with a 8000 series card and SATA drives for that.

I have heard (though I have no direct experience with it) that the 3Ware
controllers bog the system down terribly when re-mirroring. Also, these
controllers are probably optimized for RAID 5 rather than simple mirroring.
Do you know if Promise or Adaptec has something that just mirrors?

--Brett

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Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?

2005-06-26 Thread Brett Glass
I need to set up a FreeBSD server with two or more sets of
mirrored drives. What is the best controller to use for this
purpose? Note that I don't need striping or other RAID
functions -- just mirroring, hopefully with hot swap capability.
A system that could re-mirror a replacement drive with minimal
impact on performance would be ideal.

--Brett Glass
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Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine

2005-04-20 Thread Brett Glass
At 05:58 PM 4/20/2005, Kevin Kinsey wrote:

>Not in my experience. More oft than not, it's FreeBSD I "fix" and
>that other OS I "flatten".
>
>But then, maybe we work in different environments, although
>I'm betting my experience is more common than yours

I consult with, and provide service to, quite a few sysadmins
at small companies. Most of them won't bother to fix a FreeBSD
system that's gone awry like that; they'll just reinstall. They
do not have the time to investigate the subtleties of what went
wrong.

But again, I guess I believe (to bring things back on topic)
that a standard, recommended procedure should never leave your
machine, or a major subsystem thereof, unusable. It's not
hard to fix this, though in this particular case it's not just
a matter of setting code but setting a little policy. That's
why, contrary to what one recent taunting message in this thread
suggests, I can't just "go fix it." The fix has to be in the
way things are done more than in the code. Ironically, in the
FreeBSD world, this is the harder kind of change to make.

--Brett

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Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine

2005-04-20 Thread Brett Glass
At 09:16 PM 4/19/2005, Joel wrote:
  
>It sounds like a wonderful idea. 
>
>Who's going to pay for it?

The same guy who's paying all of the port maintainers now. ;-)

>Oh? Well, okay, MSWxp sp2 is not what I would call professionally
>crafted software. 

They're professionals; they're just not always competent professionals.
But they're light years ahead of FreeBSD on the issue of maintainability.
With FreeBSD, the answer is almost always to wipe the system clean and
rebuild from scratch.

>I'm not going to lie. If it were possible to fund each of the BSDs
>enough to maintain professional backporting services for every release,
>I'll admit it would sure be nice. 

There's no need. Again, just maintain a record of the most recent
version of each port that will work on each release of FreeBSD that
has not been EOLed. Simple. And make sure that the port collection
as a whole does not break itself when updated according to the 
recommended procedure. (This is the least one could expect of software
of even mediocre quality.)

--Brett Glass

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Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine

2005-04-19 Thread Brett Glass
At 08:58 PM 4/19/2005, Kris Kennaway wrote:

>Those users of FreeBSD who care about supporting the ports collection
>in a given configuration, do so.  They don't just send mails
>complaining that someone else should do it for them.  

What are you talking about? The maintainer of each port DOES support 
it for everyone else. That's the point of having port maintainers.
However, the conventions for maintenance of ports should include
support for all non-EOLed versions of FreeBSD.

>P.S. You've ignored my Reply-To for a second time.  Are you trying to
>be deliberately aggravating, or does it just come naturally to you?

My e-mail client has been honoring your "Reply-to" field correctly.
You'll note that the "To:" fields on my replies all point to the
list.

--Brett Glass

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Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine

2005-04-19 Thread Brett Glass
At 10:33 PM 4/18/2005, Kris Kennaway wrote:

>OK, but I don't care about your HO on this matter.

You may not, but users of FreeBSD do. At the very least,
ports should be tagged as to the versions of the OS
with which they will work, and it should be possible
to retrieve the most recent version of the port that
works with the version of the OS you are running.
Having users update in the standard (and prescribed)
way and finding out that a major function (the entire
ports system) is no longer working is certainly not
something one would expect from professionally crafted
software.

Note that under Linux, the maintainers of distributions
do exactly this. However, FreeBSD is essentially its own
"distro," so the job of doing this falls to the FreeBSD
developers and the maintainers of the ports. If it is
not done, FreeBSD users will enjoy an inferior experience
to the one they get with Linux or even Windows.

--Brett Glass

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