On 18/01/12 2:07 AM, Ken Smith wrote:
On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 18:37 +1100, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
The manual states that dumpdev "AUTO is the default as of FreeBSD
6.0" [1]
However:
# uname -a
FreeBSD xxxxxx 9.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE #0: Tue Jan 3 07:46:30
UTC 2012 r...@farrell.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
amd64
# grep dumpdev /etc/defaults/rc.conf
dumpdev="NO" # Device to crashdump to (device name, AUTO, or NO).
savecore_flags="" # Used if dumpdev is enabled above, and present.
It looks like NO is still the default. Is there a reason why this
should not be turned on even for production machines? I haven't read
about any side effects, but it seems to be off by default for some
reason.
Please cc me on any responses since I'm not currently subscribed.
Cheers
Ari
If you use bsdinstall(8) to install a machine from scratch it explicitly
asks you about whether you want crash dumps enabled or not.
As long as you're aware that the crash dumps are happening and know that
you might need to clean up after them (remove stuff from /var, etc)
there are no dangers. You just need to make sure wherever the crash
dumps will wind up going (/var by default) has enough space to handle
both the crash dumps and anything else the machines need to do. We
currently have no provision for preventing crash dumps from filling up
the target partition.
I keep advocating for the conservative side of this issue, preferring
that crash dumps be an opt-in setting until we have infrastructure in
place to prevent them from filling the target partition. I still
picture there being people out there who don't know what crash dumps
are, wouldn't know they might need to clean up after them, and may
be negatively impacted if the target partition wound up full without
them knowing why.
Thanks Ken. That is very clear. If you have time, please update the
documentation with that answer too since others are likely to be confused by
what I found there which is incorrect and incomplete.
Also, for ZFS users, I assume that the first swap disk will be default? So this
is another consideration when sizing up swap partitions as compared to the size
of memory installed.
Thanks
Ari
--
-------------------------->
Aristedes Maniatis
ish
http://www.ish.com.au
Level 1, 30 Wilson Street Newtown 2042 Australia
phone +61 2 9550 5001 fax +61 2 9550 4001
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