Update: rsync completed. I brought up X, Firefox, emacs and was downloading packages when the curse struck again. Little or no response to the mouse. ctrl-alt F2 got me to a fresh login prompt, but every character I type is repeated 7 times, so login is impossible. No response to ping and, not surprisingly, I can't ssh in. It occurs to me that I'm using a pcmcia 3com ethernet card that I haven't used in years and that I don't use when I run Linux on this machine (I use a wireless card in that case, but wasn't ready to tackle wireless vs. OpenBSD just yet), so that's another hardware difference. I suspect that this is just crufty old hardware acting up. I think to debug this I will install OpenBSD on another machine I have that is
- newer - there will be no hardware variation and it is all known to be good (Linux and FreeBSD have both run reliably on that machine). /Don On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Donald Allen <donaldcal...@gmail.com>wrote: > I'm an experienced hand with Linux (Gentoo, more recently Arch) and with > FreeBSD. I've recently become interested in OpenBSD and have just done a > test install of 4.5 on an old Thinkpad 600x (650 mhz, .5 Gb, 20 Gb 5400 rpm > disk, 3com Megahertz pcmcia ethernet adapter) for purposes of evaluation. > > Using the system to download and install packages and doing general setup > tasks, it behaves normally, no problems. But today, I am attempting to rsync > (I've arranged for the rsync daemon to be started at boot time) the contents > of my home directory from a FreeBSD system (something I do all the time with > other targets, for backup purposes, and to allow me to use different > machines as appropriate). I've twice had the rsync fail, with the client > complaining that it could not write to its output pipe. The OpenBSD system > was sitting at its login prompt, and attempting to login proved impossible. > Characters got echoed extremely slowly, if at all, and when they did, they > got echoed multiple times. I could not ping the system, though it was up, > but obviously in distress. As an a very experienced systems programmer > (though I haven't done any OS-level work in years), I'd offer the guess, and > its only a guess, that the system was being flooded with interrupts. Unable > to ssh in, I finally just turned the power off and rebooted. After the > fscks, the system came up normally. I checked /var/log/message and found > nothing unusual. I resumed the rsync and ran into the same problem again > after a relatively short time. I am now on my third attempt, this time > running 'top' on the OpenBSD machine, and in the spirit of Heisenberg, the > rsync is proceeding normally, almost finished. > > I normally run Arch Linux on this machine (different disk) and have had no > problems with it (I did the same rsync from the same source machine > uneventfully), so I'm not too inclined to suspect the hardware, old as it > is, except perhaps the disk, which is different hardware than when I run > Linux. > > Here's my question: should I be able to provoke this problem again, can the > collective you suggest things I should be doing, log files I ought to be > looking at, perhaps running with a kernel debugger available, etc., to have > a chance of debugging this problem? It's possible that this old machine or > the disk that's been gathering dust for some time has decided to > malfunction. But since I'm evaluating OpenBSD, I'd like to either exonerate > it or confirm that it's a bug in the system. Any help would be appreciated. > > /Don Allen
