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Date:      Tue, 9 Nov 1999 19:41:34 -0500 (EST)
From:      "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
To:        litchfieldm@bgcc.com (Mark Litchfield)
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: System recovery
Message-ID:  <199911100041.TAA42219@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
In-Reply-To: <003601bf2acb$b052b040$174f54d1@BGCC.COM> from Mark Litchfield at "Nov 9, 1999 11:01:30 am"

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Mark Litchfield wrote,
[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> Hello,
>     I'm fairly new to Unix. I know enough to be dangerous. I recently
> installed FreeBSD 3.2 and was setting up a web server. I managed to get the
> IP Aliases and everything to work and it was running like a champ. I let it
> go at that over the recent weekend. When I went to log in on Monday, I
> couldn't get any of the web pages. So I checked the IP settings and the
> httpd.conf. I tried to restarting Apache. I had also added the IP's to the
> rc.conf file before the weekend. When I noticed that the IP's weren't
> showing up. I rebooted from the prompt and the system restarted. Then a
> funny thing happened. It went along fine with the reboot then I got an error
> message... ".:Out of file descriptors." The next line asked me for the path
> to a shell application or press Enter for /bin/sh.

OK, I'm following you so far...

> I am re-installing the OS now.

Right, now you lost me.

Why are you doing this? Did you ask Microsoft support or something?

>     What I am curious about is, Is there a way to recover from that error
> without re-installing and without restoring a backup? Is there anything I
> can do to help prevent this from happening again?

Did you hit <Enter> to get the shell when asked? Why not? That's how
you recover. You go in and fix what is wrong.

>     I looked all through my " The Complete FreeBSD" book and it doesn't
> discuss a whole lot of error prevention or crash prevention. I love the OS
> and I am hooked on Linux as well. I chose to run FreeBSD as a web server and
> Linux as a Firewall. The two work well together and I wouldn't have it any
> other way. I would appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.

We most often hear about the 'out of file descriptors' problem when
someone misconfigures the rc.* files and creates a loop. And that most
often happens when someone copies /etc/defaults/rc.conf to
/etc/rc.conf and then edits /etc/rc.conf. If that is what you did,
don't do that. Just put _changes_ in /etc/rc.conf and do not copy the
default one there. (The /etc/rc script calls /etc/default/rc.conf which
in turn calls /etc/rc.conf. If you copy /etc/default/rc.conf to
/etc/rc.conf, the /etc/rc.conf script will start calling itself in an
infite loop until... you run out of file descriptors.)

HTH.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                           cjclark@home.com


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