reboot after panic

[Stephen Clark]

Clifton Royston wrote:
> On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 03:15:51PM -0400, Stephen Clark wrote:
>> Matthew X. Economou wrote:
>>> Steve,
>>>
>>> I recall having to set dumpdev in /etc/rc.conf before I could get
>>> FreeBSD to reboot automatically after a panic.  I have dumpdev=AUTO
>>> set on all of my headless servers.  If you are feeling especially
>>> brave, you can also set fsck_y_enable=YES and background_fsck=NO.
>>>
>>> Good luck!  ;)
>>>
>> Hmmm... I have that set. It only seems to not reboot on one
>> system I have.
> 
>   FWIW, I've had problems with 6.2 not rebooting reliably on several
> SMP P4 Xeon systems; the problem seems to be that sometimes while
> dumping it either freezes completely or double-faults and hangs at that
> point until physically reset.
> 
>   This problem appeared simultaneously on several SMP servers when they
> were upgraded to 6.2, after they had run reliably for years on FreeBSD
> 4.x.  Adding insult to injury, when it does dump successfully, I don't
> reliably get an image saved in /var/crash.  (And if I did, it doesn't
> appear that it would do me any good as nobody is interested any longer
> in problems with 6.2.)
> 
>   Thankfully, via a combination of adding RAM and tuning kernel
> parameters I eventually got them to where they'll reliably stay up for
> reasonably long stretches, certainly more than the 20 days uptime I was
> getting when I first upgraded them.
>   -- Clifton
>  
Thank Clifton,

Mine is a nvidia 6300 mb with a dual core amd processor. I am causing the panic
while trying to develope a DD for a EVDO usb modem - so it is not a great 
problem - I was just surprised it wasn't rebooting. This is a 6.1 system.

Yes it is sort of discouraging that it is hard to get answers when you aren't 
running the latest and greatest kernel. In our case we have over 500 units in
the field running a mix of 4.9 and 6.1 and it is not feasible to continually 
upgrade them, especially since there is no documented way to reliably upgrade
a remote installation.

Steve

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