Hi there,
I'm sharing my experiences with this in the hopes that it saves someone
else many many hours of troubleshooting and headaches. A client of mine
has a Dell Poweredge tower server with FreeBSD 6-stable on it which was
acting as their firewall. At some point in time about 6 months ago the
box started locking up every day or couple of days. I imagine this was
probably after a buildworld / installworld but I can't remember. It
would hard lock with nothing logged or any sign of anything, and no
response from the keyboard. In my experiences this usually resulted in
bad memory but after swapping out the memory for new memory the issue
still persisted. As time went on I eventually pulled the hard drives out
of the server and put them into another server with completely different
hardware (minus the transfered hard drives). After bringing the install
up on the other server I still had the hard locks. I googled like mad
and tried all sorts of things to narrow down the problem but kept coming
up with nothing. Now, I admit I'm not an elite user so I'm sure lots of
you could probably have figured it out quicker. Eventually I put new
hard drives into the original firewall (the Dell Poweredge) and did a
clean install of FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE. Unfortunately after bringing the
box online as the firewall again it continued locking up. I then updated
to -STABLE and still experienced the issue. Finally, after even more
countless hours of googling I found this thread
http://www.freebsdforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38765&page=1&pp=1
<http://www.freebsdforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38765&page=1&pp=1>
which seemed to describe the same freezing I was having. One person
mentioned setting debug.mpsafenet=0 in /boot/loader.conf and not having
a problem since doing so. Well, I ended up doing the same thing and it's
been about 25 days with not one freeze / lockup.
It's my understanding that the ability to even disable this has been
taken out of 7.x, I only can hope that it's not an issue in 7.x like it
is on some systems in 6.x. So anyway, I hope this helps someone out.
Kind regards,
Elvar
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
