Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 07:57:18 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Let's compare notes Message-ID: <199803251557.HAA03011@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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>Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 16:11:55 +1100 >From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> >Right after you installed FreeBSD, logged in and sat there at >the prompt, what's the first thing you ever did? :-) Well.... I logged in as root (to see if anything worked). Getting there was challenging: PC hardware is so *strange* -- I never did get X running on that system. (Moot point now; I hear that the person who acquired it lobotomized it so it would run some M$ stuff.) Fortunately, my boss had set up the machine I'm using now, so it's running OK... though I find that screen resolution is noticably lower than I'm used to. (Even my old Sun 3/60 at home uses 1152x900; the screen here is 1024x768, and the difference is enough that the vertical dimension of the window for xfig doesn't fit on the screen... which is really annoying, since there are useful controls along both the top & bottom edges of the window.... I'm hoping to get a framebuffer for the SS5 (at home) that will support 1280x1024, preferably with 24-bit color.) >Then what was the first thing you had to sit down and learn about? The way FreeBSD handles system initialization (/etc/rc*). Seems that everyone has A Better Way To Do Things.... :-( Then I found that the timing of the "sourcing" of /etc/rc.conf is such that the present structure doesn't quite do what I need it to, so I ended up needing to add a few lines to /etc/rc.network. (Yes, I used RCS to track these.... :-) >How did you you learn it? What resources (documents, friends, whatever) >did you use? How did you find the resources? Fortunately, we have some of the folks involved with FreeBSD here on staff (and whom I'm supposed to be supporting). Still, the reason I'm here is so they can spend more time on product-related things. And I find that my expectation that things will work as documented seems to end up with machines hanging or crashing.... I finally think(!) I have a nasty problem with NFS & amd circumvented: seems that NFS defaults to V3 if it can (which is as expected), but "loop-back" mounts (where a machine uses itself as an NFS server) can cause hangs if NFS V3 is being used, and it took a couple of weeks (during which I got the kernel upgraded from running 2.2.5-RELEASE to 2.2.6-BETA) before I found that there really was a way to tell amd to use V2... and it didn't seem to be documented anywhere I could find, until someone suggested I search the archives at www.freebsd.org. And there I found that specifying the "nfsv2" option to amd is what I needed to do. Since then, I was able to actually complete a "make" for BIND-8.1.1 (which had been repeatedly hanging the machine), so I *think* it might be OK now.... Meanwhile, I'm trying to learn what flavor of FreeBSD would be best to run for some mission-critical servers... and the above experience didn't do wonders for my confidence level. >Did you enjoy it? How long did it take to learn? It's an on-going process.... :-} Cheers, david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 401-0168 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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