[nycbug-talk] [OT] FreeBSD 5.4 crashing?

[Jim Brown]

* Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> [2005-06-30 17:18]:
> Hi all,
> 
> The past two weeks have been rough for me.  I've had our production mail 
> server, FreeBSD 5.4, and our back end LDAP servers crashing.  I've tried 
> everything, from upgrading to 5.4-STABLE, and now switching from IPF to PF 
> (which actually has made them not crash).
> 
> Problem is, even if these boxes now stay up for a month, I don't know if I 
> can trust my FreeBSD 5.4 boxes and sleep well at night (at least not 
> these).  I think in order to satisfy my boss as well (he wants to switch 
> to Debian which I'm struggling to aim away from for a high traffic mail 
> server), I need to switch OS's to something that I know will be stable so 
> we can get our new LDAP implementation in place and I can move on to other 
> projects.....
> 
> My debate right now is FreeBSD 4.11 or OpenBSD 3.7.  As an avid and long 
> time FreeBSD user, my recent install of OpenBSD seemed to go smoothly. 
> Problem is, we use adaptec raid, and OpenBSD recently lost support for 
> that, but apparently a simple kernel rebuild can do the trick.  Also, 
> people have told me that, although the SMP code is more stable on OpenBSD 
> (some responses have told me that the reason my FreeBSD installs seem to 
> keep kernel trapping HARD (they lock up) is because of unstable SMP code 
> in 5.x), it isn't used as efficiently.
> 
> Therefore .... what do you all think?  Our setup, to recap, is like this:
> 
> Orion ---> Mail server, dual 3.06 ghz xeon, 4 GB DDR 2100 Kingston, LDAP.
> Uranus --> LDAP server, dual 850 MHZ PIII, 2 GB DDR, regular PAM.
> Caliban -> LDAP server, dual 850 MHZ PIII, 2 GB DDR, regular PAM.
> 
> Thanks :)
> 
> -Matt

Have you tried a recompile for single processor only?

A couple more questions- 

 - is every item in your config on the supported hardware list?
 - did you previously run this hardware on 4.11?

I remember seeing at least one benchmark that indicated that
OpenBSD performed poorly (not a perjorative use of this term-
I'm an OBSD fan), so if you need the speed, FreeBSD or NetBSD
are the way to go.

My tool sense,
Jim B.