Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1999 12:18:26 +0200 From: Kent Boortz <kent@erlang.ericsson.se> To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu Cc: kent@erlang.ericsson.se Subject: Re: Some FAQ's..... Message-ID: <19990601121826J.kent@erlang.ericsson.se> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 31 May 1999 22:31:23 -0700 (PDT)" <Pine.BSF.4.03.9905312225340.4498-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu> References: <Pine.BSF.4.03.9905312225340.4498-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu>
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Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> wrote: > I'm not sure I can do much with this since you're not specific enough. > > I wrote this Q so I'm curious to know what exactly you're getting hung up > on. What I'm "hung up on"? That I spend hours doing something that a simple man page, the handbook or FAQ could have saved me. I have been working with Unix 14 years and used FreeBSD since 2.2 so with the right information it would have taken minutes. At work I use to brag about the quality of FreeBSD but failed to set up a stable NFS server using FreeBSD 3.1! After hours of searching I found notes that "NFSv3 is broken in 3.1, use NFSv2". I feel stupid to go back to using an old Sun as an server because no one bothered to tell me that "NFSv3 isn't working yet in 3.1". Not specific enough? If you can point out *anywhere* I can read about the answer to the questions about the boot process I would be satisfied (there is a little in boot(8)). The "loader" program does not even have a man page in 3.1. In 3.1 there is no documentation how to save the options set in "loader". I solved it finally with some guess work and a 'grep' in the binary to find the location of a configuration file. It was not obvious that the new "loader" wasn't a replacement but an addition and that I still can stop before the "loader" and type in "1:da(0,a)/kernel" as usual. I not "1:da(0,a)/boot/loader" becasuse then the unit was lost again. Writing the skeleton to two FAQ's about booting was an attempt from me to save others time. I'm a bit disappointed by the road the FreeBSD documentation has taken. I spend most my time using AltaVista and DejaNews to find answers if any. They are rarely in the FAQ or the handbook in my opinion. I wrote Robert Nordier with suggestions about improvements of the documentation of the boot process and configuration and got the answer "I'm not sure that it actually is feasible to use FreeBSD without subscribing to several of the technical mailing lists and relying heavily on the sources." I hope that is not an opinion of the rest of the FreeBSD core team. But maybe you are right, asking how to make the system boot if I have one IDE disk and one SCSI disk and asking what boot manager to use in various setups may be a problem just for me. I find that hard to believe but if you think so. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for the work done by you and others working with FreeBSD. At home I use FreeBSD exclusively. I'm probably a bit upset because I had to admit to my friends at work that FreeBSD isn't "stable" or at least not usable "out of the box" and I lost some arguments for using FreeBSD over Linux. So basically I feel a bit stupid. /kgb To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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