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Date:      Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:53:48 -0700
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        "Paul M. Balyeat" <pmbalyea@mtu.edu>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: devfs? 
Message-ID:  <199810121753.KAA06970@dingo.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 12 Oct 1998 08:30:06 EDT." <Pine.SOL.3.96.981012081341.13864A-100000@colossus.csl.mtu.edu> 

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> Ok, I'm not sure if I'm mailing this to the right people, but this is a
> tech support request. 

This is the wrong place to send this sort of request; try
questions@freebsd.org.   You'll get much better results if your message
is broken into separate paragraphs, and better again if it is logically
organised.  "Flow of consciousness" is a fine artistic technique, but 
not at all useful for technical matters.

> Anyway, yesterday morning, I woke up logged into my machine (running xdm)
> checked my mail (used ssh) then killed all connections and went to
> breakfast.  Looking over the logs indicates that noone logged during
> this time.  Came back and tried to logon, xdm would authenticate me, but
> wouldn't let me in, the authentication window would simply vanish.  I
> dropped into single user mode and edited rc.local to eliminate xdm's
> command line from the script.  During the bootup, I noticed that the
> computer was indicating that it had no open ports.  On reboot, the machine
> consistently froze when trying to start the sendmail daemon, and indicated
> that it couldn't bind ssh to port 22 because the port was already in use
> (indicated during the DEVFS initialization). 

 - Devfs is not supported
 - All of the symptoms you describe are consistent with nameserver 
   timeouts.  If you had waited a little longer, you would probably 
   found your window manager starting, eg.
 - You *must* supply error messages verbatim.  "indicating it had no 
   open ports" means nothing to anyone.

> Upon logging in, I could
> only get intermitent network support, usually being forced to reboot the
> machine in order to make telnet work.  Occasionally, it'd flash the
> warning devstat_(I can't quite remember) < 0 on boot up.  

This message is harmless, but again, if you don't supply it in its 
exact form, nobody can help you with it.

> I've tried
> reinstalling, but the boot disk just doesn't find my gateway or
> nameserver.

This is a classic indication that your network configuration has changed
in some fashion.  Reinstalling is almost never necessary; FreeBSD is 
not Windows.

It sounds like you're not telling, or plain missing, a critical item.  
Unfortunately, you're the only person that is going to be able to tell 
what this is, as we're not there.

-- 
\\  Sometimes you're ahead,       \\  Mike Smith
\\  sometimes you're behind.      \\  mike@smith.net.au
\\  The race is long, and in the  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\  end it's only with yourself.  \\  msmith@cdrom.com



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