Firefox or what?

[hw]

Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> writes:

> On Mon, 12 Aug 2019 17:37:54 +0200, hw wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> does any of the Firefox versions that can be installed with pkg
>> actually work?  Firefix continues to freeze, crash, being unable to
>> remember its settings, to not show up at all when starting it other
>> than in the process list, and it usually can't be killed even with
>> kill -9.
>
> I have a FreeBSD 12.0-p7/i386 installation running Firefox 68.0,
> and I don't have any problems. I even tried "modern" web pages,
> and even though Firefox sometimes seems to run a bit too slow,
> no crashes or freezes.
>
> But what you're describing rings a bell.
>
> Just to make sure you're not suffering from an inconsistent
> file system, boot your system in single-user mode and perform
> a forced full fsck on all filesystems, especially those carrying
> /usr/local and /home. Make sure you have the following setting
> in /etc/rc.conf:
>
> 	background_fsck="NO"
>
> Inconsistent file system can definitely cause the kind of problem
> you're seeing, so make sure it's not the case.
>
> NB: Does only apply to UFS. ;-)

The /home directories are on the NFS server wich uses xfs on hardware
RAID, and they work fine with the Linux version of Firefox when mounted
by a Debian server.

Other than that, you're right, the broken NFS implementation of FreeBSD
kinda simulates a corrupt file system.

>> If Firefox is incompatible with FreeBSD, what's the alternative?
>
> It isn't. Things that do not build or run on FreeBSD are either
> marked "BROKEN", or aren't part of the ports collection.

NFS should be marked BROKEN then. It's not only limited to exporting
whole file systems, a bug which makes it unusable for almost everything,
it is also unable to handle file locks.

I will have to re-evaluate if it's a good idea to use FreeBSD for DNS
servers.  I'll probably be better off using Centos for that like for
everything else.