kernel panic at boot on any 6.x OS

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Meyer" <mwm at mired.org>
To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com>
Cc: "Joe Auty" <joe at netmusician.org>; "Daan Vreeken [PA4DAN]"
<Danovitsch at vitsch.net>; "Kip Macy" <kip.macy at gmail.com>;
<freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>; <freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 8:36 AM
Subject: Re: kernel panic at boot on any 6.x OS

> > and do a "make deinstall" followed by downloading and compiling the
program
> > the "old fashioned way"  I shoot for a min of 3 years on the OS before
even
> > thinking about updating, and when it's time to update the hardware has
> > generally reached the old rag stage anyway.
>
> This works great for servers, that don't have any real users on them,
> and is pretty much how I do things. I'll try updating the ports tree
> and installing from that rather than building the old fashioned way,
> because that works a surprising percentage of the time.
>
> On desktop and development systems, the users tend to get pissed if I
> let things get that old. So I do upgrade them more often.

That depends on who's paying for it.  If your in-house support your screwed
of course, since all of them think your labor hours are inexhaustable.

But if the users are in a small business or whatever that has to actually
pay
real money to have their systems updated, then they are usually a lot less
enthusiastic about new updates (at least, their owners are)

> There are a
> couple of things you can do to make reinstalling to a clean disk a bit
> less painfull.
>
> 1) Intelligent file system layout. I put all the things that aren't
> installed from the FreeBSD disks on their own partitions (/home and
> /local). I can then wipe and reinstall /, /var and /usr without
> clobbering the non-system data.
>
> 2) Mirrored disks. Disks for consumer systems are cheap. Throwing a
> second one in a system and mirroring the system disk is a cheap way to
> improve the reliability of the system. When it's time to upgrade, take
> a drive out of the mirror, and install to that drive. You can reboot
> to the old system if you need to interrupt the process and run the old
> system for some reason. With a file system layout as per #1, you can
> even mount the users files under both versions of the OS. When you're
> happy with the new system, mirror the new system drive to the old one.
>

I do the mirroring thing too but the one thing you have to watch is
inadequate
cooling in some of these minitowers.  Stacking the disks on top of each
other
with no cooling fan blowing air on them is not a good idea.

Ted