Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 08:38:27 -0700 From: "Justin Wolf" <jjwolf@bleeding.com> To: <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Stability concerns in latest -STABLEs. Message-ID: <003701be989f$bb6f2d00$06c3fe90@bleeding.com> References: <199905071459.AAA64981@zeus.theinternet.com.au>
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Not that I can add anything of any value to this ongoing discussion, but what the hell, it's a mail list. If you don't care to know my 2 cents, just delete this and move along.... this is just my editorial on this whole strange rash of useless reports of random reboots. Firstly, many people in the FBSD community, like myself, do strange and unnatural things to their boxes. This occasionally has the effect of making it misbehave. Minor configuration (software or hardware) tweaks often solve this problem. Perhaps we can expect Microsoft with their billions to fix every corner case, but FreeBSD is not that kind of OS. If you want a company to blame, go buy Solaris. Or better yet, NT. It's faster than Solaris x86 and has a bigger company (more dollars) to sue when it eventually does crash while working eBay one second before the auction closes and you miss the opportunity of a life time. Next, there have been a few problems - all unrelated as far as I can tell. Does the version number 3 somehow make people want to report all those things that in 2.2, 2.1, and before were forgiven as just "oh, they'll fix this in the next release?" If it truely was this unstable, how would it have gotten past 3.0? A lot of people more skilled than I have been working on the 3.0 line of FreeBSD for years. I've been using FreeBSD since 2.1.6. I can get it to reboot without reporting anything in the logs (in a standard config anyway) pretty easily. Running it out of resources is the best way to do this. Keep an eye on system status with 'top' (or for the purist, uptime, vmstat, fstat, and ps -aux). I currently run a 3.1-R machine that is used by several random people doing more or less random things (scp, gcc, screen, irc, pine, mutt, whatever... it's a shell box) and haven't had any problems. It's been up a week now without anything funky going on (had to reinstall last weekend do to unrelated illnesses). Prior to this, it was a 2.2.8 machine that only ever reset itself when I pushed the button. When I did the reinstall it was up over 3 1/2 months. I have a 3.0 machine here at home just about to start its third month. Only problem I've had is when the perl scirpt it runs every 30 seconds forgets to let go of its PID and effectively fork bombs the machine. Also, being a programmer by trade, I can't stress this enough. If you have no clue as to what could possibly causing the problem, sending a mail saying "Hmm, it crashed, dunna why, I wasn't doing anything different," means that there's no way the people responsible for fixing it if it really were a problem can pull a fix from the aether. My favorite saying is "If it's not reproducible, it's not a bug." Freak occurances happen every day. Some guy's dog even got hit by a meteor once. That doesn't mean that the wolrd governments should build a massive micrometeorite defense system. This is why I haven't reported any of my less-than-obvious crashes, reboots, and mysterious bugs. I wouldn't be able to provide any more information than "It was up for a few weeks, then I came home one night and it was sitting at the "System halted" message (that turned out to be bad memory that for some reason, Windows liked just fine - it only crashed during kernel compiles). But then, I also understand what the 'Free' in FreeBSD means. If you can't hold yourself accountable for something weird, go buy some accountability from a corporation (like Sun or Microsoft - who knows, maybe you'll even like the little trash bin). If you think this situation is only the case with FBSD, it also extends to Linux - and perhaps even more so. There are at least 3 major unaccountable strains of Linux. Wait for Microsoft to buy them, then install it. (Oh, and read http://www.rootshell.com...) So what have I really said? 1) If something weird happens, don't talk about it until you can tell us what it was, 2) If you can't figure it out, come to the table with more information than "it rebooted," and 3) don't expect a free (and now quite massive) software movement to have the same bug fixing attitude as either some guy in Texas making a (pretty cool) Windows FTP server or some big company that has a marketing image to uphold. I guess this is a pretty lengthy 2-cents... you probably should have just deleted it and moved along like I told you to. -Justin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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