FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE stability?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: [FreeBSD-Announce] vBSDcon Registrations Only Open For 30 More Days!
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Help! Cannot boot after freebsd-update update to 9.1-p5
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Bad kernel with make -j?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
When will binary packages be back?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: When will binary packages be back?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: When will binary packages be back?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
How close is 9.1 to release?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
How to keep freebsd-update from trashing custom kernel?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Maximum number of tun pseudo-devices
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Quick build of stripped-down kernel
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Quick build of stripped-down kernel
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Memory error?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Timing of FreeBSD 9.0-RC2?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Approximate date of RC1?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Timeline for 9.0-RELEASE?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Patent expired; time to add protocol to FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
ICMP redirects and FreeBSD
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system
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=0x183f9ffFPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR real memory = 536870912 (512 MB) avail memory = 515813376 (491 MB) acpi0: AMIINT AMIINT10 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: ACPI CPU on acpi0 pcib0: ACPI Host-PCI bridge port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0 pci0: ACPI PCI bus on pcib0 atapci0: SiS 620 UDMA66 controller port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xffa0-0xffaf at devic e 0.1 on pci0 ata0: ATA channel 0 on atapci0 ata0: [ITHREAD] ata1: ATA channel 1 on atapci0 ata1: [ITHREAD] isab0: PCI-ISA bridge at device 1.0 on pci0 isa0: ISA bus on isab0 pci0: unknown at device 1.1 (no driver attached) pci0: serial bus, USB at device 1.2 (no driver attached) pcib1: PCI-PCI bridge at device 2.0 on pci0 pci1: PCI bus on pcib1 vgapci0: VGA-compatible display 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: MII bus 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: ADMtek AN985 10/100BaseTX port 0xd800-0xd8ff mem 0xefffa800-0xefffabff irq 12 at device 9.0 o n pci0 miibus1: MII bus on dc0 ukphy0: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface 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: MII bus 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: Power Button on acpi0 acpi_button0: enable wake failed atrtc0: AT realtime clock port 0x70-0x71 irq 8 on acpi0 orm0: ISA Option ROMs at iomem 0xc-0xc7fff,0xc8000-0xc87ff,0xc8800-0xd7fff pnpid ORM on is a0 sc0: System console at flags 0x100 on isa0 sc0: VGA 16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300 vga0: Generic ISA VGA at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa-0xb on isa0 atkbdc0: Keyboard controller (i8042) at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0 atkbd0: AT Keyboard 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 QUANTUM FIREBALLlct10 10 A03.0900 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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Negative ping times with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on older Celeron system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Cutting sendmail out of the loop
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Cutting sendmail out of the loop
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 - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1392 / Virus Database: 1520/3876 - Release Date: 09/04/11 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Huge interrupt overhead reported after RAM added to Atom-based system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
at command and mail
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: at command and mail
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Huge interrupt overhead reported after RAM added to Atom-based system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: at command and mail
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Huge interrupt overhead reported after RAM added to Atom-based system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: at command and mail
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Turn off hyperthreading on dual core Atom?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Turn off hyperthreading on dual core Atom?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: System hanging, error messages with USB drive on FreeBSD 8.1
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Last Stacker patent expires May 14th
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Realtek 8111C support?
Does FreeBSD 8.1 have support for the Realtek 8111C GigE adapter chip? --Brett Glass ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Realtek 8111C support?
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.netbr...@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 -- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.comwww.avg.com Version: 10.0.1153 / Virus Database: 424/3264 - Release Date: 11/18/10 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Driver support for Supereal SR9600 USB-to-Ethernet chip?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
CF Ethernet for FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: CF Ethernet for FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
What does this message mean?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
HTT on Atom (Was: FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset)
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: FreeBSD 8.0 and Atheros AzureWave wireless chipset
Dead as in doesn't show in dmesg/pciconf Yep, that's correct. The only hint of it is the following message: pci3: network at device 0.0 (no driver attached) --Brett ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
kern.polling.lost_polls
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: kern.polling.lost_polls
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Date/time formats in ps
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
State of interface polling in FreeBSD
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Why is sendmail is part of the system and not a package?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
IPFW in-kernel NAT: How to compile?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: IPFW in-kernel NAT: How to compile?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: IPFW in-kernel NAT: How to compile?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Status of hyperthreading in FreeBSD
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Secondary DNS or BSD Server space
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Wine compatibility and performance on FreeBSD 7
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Support for Realtek 8187-based USB Wi-Fi adapters?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Inverse ARP query
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel
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 ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel
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 ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel
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 ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel
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 ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel
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 ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Virally licensed code in FreeBSD kernel
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 ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Upgrade from 4.x - 6.2: Old file systems?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
DST on very old FreeBSD system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: DST on very old FreeBSD system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nfsiod
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nfsiod
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] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Best way to renice a process by name?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Best gigabit network interface for FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hostile vs. Friendly instances of Sendmail
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hostile vs. Friendly instances of Sendmail
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Increasing socket send buffer size
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Strange errors from BIND on FreeBSD 4.x system
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Internal DSL modems for FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Internal DSL modems for FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Internal DSL modems for FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sendmail X port
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Has this box been hacked?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Has this box been hacked?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Has this box been hacked?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?
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=GORange=1bop=anddescription=cagesrchInDesc=SATA Anything that'll fit in a 17 relay rack? --Brett ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD?
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.anything 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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine
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 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine
I've been asked to upgrade some software on an older FreeBSD 4.x box. (The
owner is getting ready to move to a new box with 4.11 but can't take the
machine out of production just yet.) I upgraded all of the ports via CVS, and
then discovered that none of them would build. When I try to build a port,
I get messages like
/usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk, line 4852: Malformed conditional
(defined(USE_RCORDER) || defined(USE_RC_SUBR) ${USE_RC_SUBR:U} != YES)
I'm not sure, but it appears that the master Makefile for the ports collection
was updated during the CVS update and requires features that the make utility
which shipped with that version of FreeBSD doesn't have. (Correct me if I'm
wrong here, but that's what it looks like at first glance.) How can I build
ports on that box? Note that I may be in a bit of a Catch-22 situation,
since any solution that requires installing a new make won't work if I have
to build it from a port.
--Brett Glass
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Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine
At 09:19 PM 4/18/2005, Kris Kennaway wrote: Fortunately, make is not built from a port. You need to update your version of FreeBSD to use ports on that box. In other words, if one innocently updates one's ports one day, one may suddenly find oneself to do anything with ports at all? This seems to violate POLA. --Brett Glass ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine
At 10:16 PM 4/18/2005, Kris Kennaway wrote: The ports support policy is right there on www.freebsd.org/ports for all to read. It's not reasonable, IMHO. If a release hasn't been EOLed, ports should work on it. --Brett ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
