From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Sep 27 09:39:17 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id JAA03191 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 27 Sep 1996 09:39:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from itsdsv1.enc.edu (itsdsv1.enc.edu [199.93.252.241]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id JAA03136 for ; Fri, 27 Sep 1996 09:39:11 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dingo.enc.edu (dingo.enc.edu [199.93.252.229]) by itsdsv1.enc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id MAA29136 for ; Fri, 27 Sep 1996 12:38:39 -0400 Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 12:38:39 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Owens To: questions list FreeBSD Subject: a freebsd testimonial Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hi, I hope nobody minds, but I'm just _so_ happy with the stability of my FreeBSD servers of late that I feel that I must share this with whoever's listening. (I guess, as my wife claims, that I really am a nerd ;-) Perhaps this may serve as a message of hope for those who may be currently battling stability problems. Anyhow, one of my main servers happily tells me: > uptime 12:10PM up 139 days, 13:37, 10 users, load averages: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00 This box runs FreeBSD 2.1-stable (circa 3/16/96) and serves as Web server (www.enc.edu) email server (pop, imap, and telnet access) NIS master for ~900 users (and rising) DNS server various other tasks Other info, for the curious: ASUS P55TP4XE motherboard, 90 MHz Pentium, 512k pburst cache 64 MB RAM (60ns) Acculogic PCIport/20 Fast/Wide SCSI controller (NCR 53c825 based) 1 gig FAST SCSI2 drive 4-gig SCSI-2 FAST/WIDE drive (Seagate Hawk) Digital PCI Ethernet board I used to have loads of problems with this box. The following steps brought it to its current state: 1. New motherboard (was some flukey SiS-chipset no-name board) 2. New SCSI controller (was a noname board, same NCR chipset, but generated scsi bus errors and lousy performance) 3. A realization about quotas: I'd heard somewhere that its a good idea to turn the quota system off (quotaoff) before changing a user's quotas (edquota). I'd been doing this in my adduser script and whenever I added a user the system would crash shortly thereafter. Apparantly some nasty system bug was being triggered. Not toggling the quota system on and off before using edquota got rid of a good portion of my system crashes. #1 and #2 took care of the rest. Anyone have any ideas why this (the quota thing) was happening? A lesson: Insist on quality hardware!! (and note: expensive and/or big-name does not always mean quality) Anyway, I'm a _very_ satisfied FreeBSD user. All you FreeBSD contributors: you do _great_ work! Thanks, --- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Owens Email: owensc@enc.edu "I read somewhere to learn is to Information Technology Services remember... and I've learned that Eastern Nazarene College we've all forgot..." - King's X -------------------------------------------------------------------------