Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash

[Joe Greco]

> On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote:
> > FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested
> 
> As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically
> it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer
> version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed
> since then.
> 
> Doug

So you're saying that he should have been using 8.3-RELEASE, then.

If you'll kindly go over to http://www.freebsd.org and look under
"Latest Releases", please note that "8.2" is a production release.
If you don't want it to be a production release, then find a way
to make it so, but please don't snipe at people who are using the
code that the FreeBSD project has indicated is a current production
offering.

There are many good reasons not to run arbitrary snapshots on your
production gear.  It's unrealistic to expect people to run non-
RELEASE non-production code on their production gear.  We can have
that discussion if you don't understand that, drop me a note off-
list and I'll be happy to explain it.

Otherwise, you've told him to run a "newer version," of which NONE
IS AVAILABLE, unless you're thinking 9.0, but FreeBSD has a rather
catastrophic history of "point zero" releases, and most clueful
admins won't run those in production without carefully measuring
the risks and benefits.  So you've basically told him to run a
newer version without any such version being realistically 
available.

WTF? 

You want people not to use releases that "came out over a year 
ago"?  The generally sensible solution to that is to release 
RELEASEs more than once every fourteen or fifteen months.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.