From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Nov 9 16:38: 6 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9BE42151DA for ; Tue, 9 Nov 1999 16:38:01 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id TAA42219; Tue, 9 Nov 1999 19:41:35 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199911100041.TAA42219@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Re: System recovery In-Reply-To: <003601bf2acb$b052b040$174f54d1@BGCC.COM> from Mark Litchfield at "Nov 9, 1999 11:01:30 am" To: litchfieldm@bgcc.com (Mark Litchfield) Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 19:41:34 -0500 (EST) Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Mark Litchfield wrote, [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...] > Hello, > I'm fairly new to Unix. I know enough to be dangerous. I recently > installed FreeBSD 3.2 and was setting up a web server. I managed to get the > IP Aliases and everything to work and it was running like a champ. I let it > go at that over the recent weekend. When I went to log in on Monday, I > couldn't get any of the web pages. So I checked the IP settings and the > httpd.conf. I tried to restarting Apache. I had also added the IP's to the > rc.conf file before the weekend. When I noticed that the IP's weren't > showing up. I rebooted from the prompt and the system restarted. Then a > funny thing happened. It went along fine with the reboot then I got an error > message... ".:Out of file descriptors." The next line asked me for the path > to a shell application or press Enter for /bin/sh. OK, I'm following you so far... > I am re-installing the OS now. Right, now you lost me. Why are you doing this? Did you ask Microsoft support or something? > What I am curious about is, Is there a way to recover from that error > without re-installing and without restoring a backup? Is there anything I > can do to help prevent this from happening again? Did you hit to get the shell when asked? Why not? That's how you recover. You go in and fix what is wrong. > I looked all through my " The Complete FreeBSD" book and it doesn't > discuss a whole lot of error prevention or crash prevention. I love the OS > and I am hooked on Linux as well. I chose to run FreeBSD as a web server and > Linux as a Firewall. The two work well together and I wouldn't have it any > other way. I would appreciate any help I can get. Thanks. We most often hear about the 'out of file descriptors' problem when someone misconfigures the rc.* files and creates a loop. And that most often happens when someone copies /etc/defaults/rc.conf to /etc/rc.conf and then edits /etc/rc.conf. If that is what you did, don't do that. Just put _changes_ in /etc/rc.conf and do not copy the default one there. (The /etc/rc script calls /etc/default/rc.conf which in turn calls /etc/rc.conf. If you copy /etc/default/rc.conf to /etc/rc.conf, the /etc/rc.conf script will start calling itself in an infite loop until... you run out of file descriptors.) HTH. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message