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Date:      Thu, 13 Jan 2000 09:06:19 -0600 (CST)
From:      Bruce DeVault <bruce@fw.intechsoft.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   recurring bad file descriptors
Message-ID:  <200001131506.JAA00597@fw.intechsoft.net>

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My setup is an amd k6/2 300 with 160mb ram, a 3 gig IDE drive,
and two 34 gig IDE drives.  The 3 gig drive is the primary master,
with filesystems for /, swap, /usr, /var, /tmp, and /home. The two
34 gig drives each have a single 30 gig filesystem, the two of
which are striped RAID-0 with vinum. Softupdates are running on all
filesystems except for /.

I had repeated problems getting the large IDE drives to work, and
I've come to understand that FreeBSD has some bugs with regard to
these drives, and my workaround was to use less than their full
size and stripe them.  They seem to be working fine, but I'm
experiencing another problem that's approaching severe.

After doing a cvsup and make world last week, I noticed a slew of
messages on reboot saying "bad file descriptor: /dev/wd2" etc.
There were about 20 of them and they were almost all in the /dev
directory and they were all on the / filesystem.  I rebooted in
single user and ran fsck on the read only root system and restarted,
and the number of error messages was reduced to three.  I posted a
query about it on -questions, but no one answered.  Then, after a
subsequent cvsup and make world, I rebooted to see 20 something bad
file descriptor warnings again. This time, when I brought it down
to single user and fsck'd it, one of the files it "corrected" was
the system console device, and another was the character mode
device for the /usr filesystem, resulting in kernel panics on
startup. I attempted to fix it with a "fix it" disk, but apparently
I wasn't up to the task. I ended up re-fdisk'ing the drive and
doing a complete reinstall of BSD and all the filesystems on the 3
gig primary master drive.

Incidentally the 3 gig drive formats with no bad sectors, as do the
other two. The BIOS is set to normal mode for all three, and BSD
seems to recognize them with the correct geometry.

After doing my reinstall of 3.4-RELEASE, I did a quick kernel build
to get my internet connection back up and running with ipfw, then
cvsup'd and did a make world. When I finished make world, build a
new kernel (just adding IPDIVERT, IPFIREWALL, IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE and
SOFTUPDATES) and rebooted, a had twenty something bad file descriptor
messages, just like before.

I'm afraid to reboot the thing or do any more make worlds because I
can't afford for this machine to be down any more than it has been.

Can someone tell me what's going on?  My first reaction was that
maybe the FreeBSD bug about IDE drives was the problem, but all of
my problems are on the / filesystem on a drive that's only 3 gig in
size, a size that's extremely common.

I'm really at a loss here, any help you could provide would be
greatly appreciated.

Bruce DeVault
InTech Software


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