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Date:      Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:46:40 +0100
From:      Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Anthony's drive issues.Re: ssh password delay
Message-ID:  <110900121.20050323034640@wanadoo.fr>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSX.4.61.0503221106150.23402@valkyrie.local>
References:  <423E116D.50805@usmstudent.com> <423EEE60.2050205@dial.pipex.com> <eeef1a4c0503211224572d64e4@mail.gmail.com> <eeef1a4c050322010021fd8eb4@mail.gmail.com> <eeef1a4c050322014420d89861@mail.gmail.com> <c112a9a423c9f4a9702d0e1f959e7b59@chrononomicon.com> <a44e8b1d23bc412823c0f654ac384afa@chrononomicon.com> <Pine.OSX.4.61.0503221106150.23402@valkyrie.local>

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Duo writes:

> And, herein lies the main and core behavioral issue at play: He is upset,
> because he is used to a system, which is more apt to fail "open", than
> fail "closed".

It's more complex than that:

(1) I don't know if anything is failing or not, because the messages
output by FreeBSD are undocumented, and nobody here has been able to
tell me anything about what they mean. The mere output of messages does
not necessarily indicate a failure. And unless someone can tell me what
they mean, they are worse than useless to me. Why write an OS to output
messages that are completely undocumented and unintelligible? That's
even worse than not putting out any messages at all. It doesn't help
anyone because nobody knows what the messages mean.

(2) Unlike Windows NT, FreeBSD freezes the process doing the I/O when
these messages appear, sometimes for 30 seconds or so, or longer.
Windows NT never froze in that way.

(3) Unlike Windows NT, FreeBSD occasionally crashes after printing the
messages.  Windows NT never crashed in that way.

If you think these messages indicate a hardware failure, they you should
be able to tell me exactly what they mean.  Conversely, if you cannot
tell me exactly what they mean, you don't know if they indicate a
hardware failure or not--you're just guessing, like everyone else here.

The behavior I'm seeing in FreeBSD strongly resembles that of a system
that is encountering a hardware idiosyncrasy that it doesn't know how to
deal with.  I'm not at all convinced that there is a hardware problem.
Looking at the messages gives me the impression that FreeBSD is
attempting something that is not supported by the hardware, and simply
takes for granted that it will work, and then gets confused when it
doesn't.

But I don't really know for sure, because nothing is documented, and
nobody here knows anything.

-- 
Anthony




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