memstick serial console install is completely illegible ... am I doing something wrong ?

2013-04-29 Thread Jason Usher
I have the latest 9.1-RELEASE memstick image burned to a USB drive. I boot from that and connect to my device with a serial console. At some point, the installer asks me what terminal emulation I am using - I choose vt100. But then things go to hell ... I am not complaining that the screen

Can I migrate from ataraid to graid ?

2012-11-21 Thread Jason Usher
We created a few 8.3-RELEASE systems with boot mirrors using onboard Intel ICH10R. The system picks up the mirror with ataraid and I see it in dmesg like this: ar0: 114312MB DDF RAID1 status: READY But it seems that graid is a much better option, and ataraid has problems (I am seeing chatter

Why can't I set my cpu type in kernel config ?

2012-08-06 Thread Jason Usher
I am installing 8.3-RELEASE on an old 900mhz pentium laptop ... it's an i686 CPU. By default, GENERIC has HAMMER as the cpu, and that isn't working. So I tried both: cpu I586_CPU and: cpu I686_CPU (I also tried them both lowercase, like i686_cpu) But all of these fail: GENERIC:

Using smartctl to detect scan errors (like google tells me to do ...)

2012-07-09 Thread Jason Usher
The big report that google published made it clear that even a single scan error in the SMART data of a disk drive is a good predictor of eventual failure... However, when I run smartctl: # smartctl -a /dev/da0 | grep -i pre-fail 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 016Pre-fail

implementing ipv6 into my ipfw ruleset...

2012-06-05 Thread Jason Usher
I have a fairly simple ipfw ruleset, which looks like: 100 allow tcp from any to any established 110 allow icmp from any to any icmptypes 0,3,8,11 120 deny icmp from any to any 130 allow ip from any to any via lo0 200 allow udp from me to any 53 210 allow udp from any 53 to me 220 allow udp

USB thumb drives for bootable flash FreeBSD installation...

2011-10-17 Thread Jason Usher
I'm going to run FreeBSD off of a flash drive on some older mac mini systems. Before I begin, though, I'd like some advice on the best USB thumb drives for this. These systems will be deployed and left in place, hopefully for YEARS in a remote, inaccessible location. So, I'd like to make sure

Parallel fscks on large filesystems ... wondering about maxdsiz setting...

2011-10-05 Thread Jason Usher
Old 6.4-RELEASE system. Two filesystems exist, each of which is on its own raid controller. (Background fsck is not workable for various reasons that are tl;dr.) So, theoretically, doing both fscks at the same time is workable, since each of them are on their own controller, and no

How can I disable hyperthreads, but NOT smp ?

2011-09-20 Thread Jason Usher
FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE system with two physical CPUs, each of which are HT capable. From dmesg: cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID: 0 cpu1 (AP): APIC ID: 1 cpu2 (AP): APIC ID: 6 cpu3 (AP): APIC ID: 7 I also see this: machdep.hyperthreading_allowed: 0 The problem is, I have reason to believe that my workload