Improper shutdown of system / Fragmentation Problems / Boot logs

[Bill Moran]

[It's not generally good policy to ask multiple questions in one email.  As
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Bruce Hunter <bhunter at solisix.com> wrote:

> This is off topic, I was wondering if there is a pretty little gui that
> will run when booting. Kinda like windows, lindows, and even Redhat
> Fedora has one; which can be switched back and forth. Basically, so I
> don't have to see the text scrolling down and just see a loader with %.
> Maybe in the ports collection? If not I might have write one. :oP

See the various documents on boot splash screens.  "man splash" on your
FreeBSD system is the best reference I know of, although a google search is
likely to turn up more.

I don't know of anything more advanced than that.  You may have to write it ;)

> Oh, and thanks for your comments/answers. One last question thought? How
> do I get rid of that fragmentation crap? Just for shits and giggles..
> ;o)

Just keep using your system.  UFS manages fragmentation during normal usage.

However, fragmentation is not what you think it is.  If you tried to evaluate
a UFS file system compared to Windows idea of fragmentation, it would look
fragmented as hell, but UFS does this in a controlled manner that is intended
to maintain high-performance, and "correcting" it would actually be counter-
productive.  UFS fragmentation is the act of breaking down storage units into
smaller ones to accomodate files of uneven sizes, and I don't know of any
way to prevent this other than deleting such files.

See /usr/share/doc/papers/diskperf.ascii.gz for a more technical explanation
of how things work.

> 
> Bruce
> 
> On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 02:09, Murray Taylor wrote:
> > Fragmentation is a non-event in 99.999% of cases. It is nothing like 
> > micro$lop fragments and (before you ask, no there is no defrag tool,
> > 'cos it is not required)
> > 
> > The shutdown question -- well you should not shutdown incorrectly ;-)
> > - see man shutdown   and friends
> > (BTW - letting the FreeBSD box run and run and run wont hurt anything.
> > I'm currently up to 72 days uptime since I last updated the system, and
> > we had a machine that got to 698 days here at work .. we had to move
> > buildings and thus shut it down..)
> > 
> > for the last question the file you want is 
> > 
> > /var/run/dmesg.boot
> > 
> > which is the boot output from the most recent boot.
> > 
> > You can also see it by issuing the command 
> > dmesg
> > but the display that this one shows can get over written as the system
> > does other log messages.
> > 
> > Hope this helps
> > mjt
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 16:01, Bruce Hunter wrote:
> > > I am kinda new to FBSD, still kinda learning stuff. Anyway, when my
> > > system boots i see all kinda fragmentation information. How do I correct
> > > this? Any good reading material? Also, what should I do when I shutdown
> > > my system incorrectly and boot up again? Last questions! I promise. Is
> > > there a file that shows the data printed to screen durning boot?
> > > Probably, a log file.
> > > 
> > > Thanks guys,
> > > Bruce
> > > 
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-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com