From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 12 10:49:13 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id KAA03032 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:49:13 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (castles238.castles.com [208.214.165.238]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA03018 for ; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:49:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Received: from dingo.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dingo.cdrom.com (8.9.1/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA06970; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:53:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@dingo.cdrom.com) Message-Id: <199810121753.KAA06970@dingo.cdrom.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: "Paul M. Balyeat" cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: devfs? In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 12 Oct 1998 08:30:06 EDT." Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:53:48 -0700 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message