Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 08:53:17 -0500 From: The Babbler <bts@babbleon.org> To: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bridging with 3C589D-COMBO on 4.2-RELEASE? Message-ID: <3AAF77CD.5B204389@babbleon.org> References: <3AAC4C03.13000DE@babbleon.org> <3AAC4E83.2C281B90@babbleon.org> <15021.46309.150521.925816@nomad.yogotech.com> <3AADBAB8.36039542@babbleon.org> <20010313104711.B6592@pir.net> <3AAF047F.341981B2@babbleon.org> <20010314075132.A8440@pir.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[I was going to take this off-line since I'm not sure that everybody really wants to read this, but I noticed that you have your reply-to set to the list for some reason, so I'm going to respect that request and keep it public. If you want to reply personally to me that's fine, and we can post a summary at the end of the discussion.] Peter Radcliffe wrote: > > The Babbler <bts@babbleon.org> probably said: > > Peter Radcliffe wrote: > > > PCMCIA under freebsd seems far more stable than Linux PCMCIA support > > > when _correctly_ _configured_. I've helped dozens of people get > > > wavelan support working at conferences and getting it as stable with > > > Linux requires the exact correct versions (and the only way to find > > > them is to test) of half a dozen things ... > > I haven't used WaveLANS, but every PCMCIA I ever stuck in my Linux box > > just worked. > > It sometimes took a couple of _days_ of hackery to get wavelan cards > working with some linux boxes, the only fast way at the first > conference was to find the person who already had it working and ask > them what they did. Certainly not "just working". Ok, I believe you. FreeBSD handles WaveLAN cards. It handles them much better Linux. I'd just like you to admit that FreeBSD has inferior PCMCIA support in other ways. > > in January or so for the saga on *that*. Similarly, I could *never* get > > two identical cards to work on my gateway machine; I finally bought a > > card to make FreeBSD happy. With Linux it just worked. Easy. > > I've had identical cards working perfectly in the same machine. I wish you'd been around on the list in January and able to help me then. > > To say the least, then, my experience does not concord with yours in > > this regard. > > Mine nor dozens of other people. Well, there are dozens of people with my same experience, I'm sure; I get personal mail from a number of them (one of them just yesterday) hoping to hear what success I had in solving some of my problems. I've been able to help some people get their cards working, in fact, by helping them with their pccard.conf files. All of the cards I'm talking about, under Linux, don't require changing any configuratin files anyplace. And that's not to even mention the fact that my computer locks up hard if I do a soft boot with my 3com card in the bay--FreeBSD fails to shut something down properly on the card, the result of which is that it locks up the machine on reboot. I can softboot Windows and Linux without any trouble. I'd actually forgotten about this problem when I was writing before, because I've worked around it--by aliasing both "halt" and "reboot" to "shutdown -p now." But again, that's pretty lame. Linux and Windows both manage to do better. > > > I read the FreeBSD readme. And I've had a nubmer of posting in the > > emultors group as I got things working there, too. The bridging would > > never work for me, but my final conclusion is that my card doesn't work > > with bridging, I guess. Only some cards do. (It says *that* in the > > /usr/ports/emulators/vmware2/files/README.FreeBSD > > - Support only for Host networking. Doesn't have a bridgink networking > But really this mean, that you are need to enable gateway on > our FreeBSD box. And after that virtual machine can communicate > with a rest of the world. Damnit, you are really starting to get annoying. You are as bad as the blind "everything Windows does must be best" advocates. I said I READ THE README. I meant that I READ THE README. You can check the freebsd-emulators list archive. I've *DONE* that. I *KNOW* that. I used host-only networking under Linux anyway, because that way I could use my host machine to do the address translation, and then the guest O/Ss didn't have to know when I moved from one network to another, only the host did. But if I enabled bridging in my kernel (which is where this thread started--did you ever read my *original* post?), then the card totally fails to initilize and FreeBSD itself (the host) loses all networking since the network card stops functioning. (Did I mention that I never had any trouble with a kernel option disabling a hardware driver under Linux?) If I used the very latest vwmware2 port I couldn't communicate even from vmnet1 to the guest. I still haven't been able to get a gateway configuation going to make vmware work. Would be you willing to "put your money where you mouth is" and help me through it? I'll readily admit that I'm no expert in the area of gateways, although was able to get this working under Linux with relative ease. > > > I would assume you have a misconfiguration or a hardware problem. > > > I've had freebsd boxes doing routing/filtering/pcmcia up for > > > _months_ with no problems. > > PCMCIA-based laptops or desktops? > > Both. Two examples are an old 486 laptop as a wavelan <-> ether > gateway and a desktop box that wasn't rebooted with an ISA pcmcia > controller which I used CF cards in. My current laptop only gets > rebooted for upgrades, basicly, has been suspended/resumed thousands > of times and it's primary net access is pcmcia wavelan. I'm typing on > it right now. Perhaps I'd be better off with wavelans. Clearly they are the card of choice for you. Is it not at least conceivable that FreeBSD has superior support for wavelans and inferior suport for Linksys and 3com cards? > > Happened to me twice within days of my install. Both times it was > > "cal.vcs," for what it's worth. That's the calendar database for > > korganize, which *is* loaded, but would have had no reason to be writing > > to disk when I crashed. > > Sounds like bad hardware to me, then. Have you been reading the write > cache thread ? Yes, I've been finding that one quite interesting. That said, I was running Linux for over a year on this exact same machine. It never crashed anywhere near as much as FreeBSD, but it did crash a few times (or at least get X lockups), though, and I never lost any data. > I currently run soemthing like 10 heavily used desktops/laptops for > my group at work. I hammer my machines. I've _never_ seen this happen. > > > I never lost any files under Linux except once when I had a physical > > disk failure. > > I've never lost any files under FreeBSD except for physical disk > failure. Your point ? My point is that any claims about the *superior* ability of FreeBSD to avoid losses in the filesystem are at odds with my experience. This could, of course, just be fantastically bad luck on my part. It only happened twice, and that's not a statistically significant sample size. (Unlike my PCMCIA troubles, which have covered two machines and numerous different problems.) > > No manual entry for diagnostic. Also, I did a "make search" on ports. > > No "diagnostic" there, either. > > It's a kernel entry; > > # The DIAGNOSTIC option is used to enable extra debugging information > options DIAGNOSTIC > > > As for ddb, what you do, leave it up for two weeks waiting for the > > elusive crash? Wouldn't that have a severe impact on performance at > > least? > > No. My laptop runs with DDB in the kernel dating from when there was a > problem with removing/reinserting ATA cards a few times in 4.* and I > was trying to assist in debugging the issue. Never saw any reason to > turn it off after the issue was fixed properly and have noticed no > performance issues. > > > Besides, when it hangs, it *hangs*. It won't even respond to keyboard > > input, not even CTL-ALT-DEL or ALT-F2. How would I use an interactive > > debugger in this context? Use the remote debugging? To do that, do I > > Thats the point of DDB. You drop to the debugger, which is below > everything else. > > You don't seem to be able to drop to DDB while running X, which is > unfortunate, but crash dumps can still help assuming one happens > or can be provoked and you have collection turned on. > > http://www.freebsd.org/docs/en/books/handbook/kerneldebug.html Ok, thanks. I'll try enabling those and see what happens. For the gateway machine, I don't have X installed anyway, and so far on the main laptop machine the crashes have all involved "configuration" sorts of things. I don't think this excuses FreeBSD morally, as it were, but it makes it less of a long-term issue since I'm anticipating that once I get the configuration completed it won't be such a problem. (And, again, Linux doesn't crash while I configure it--granted that most of it worked automatically enough that no configuration was necessary--if it has an equivalent of /etc/pccard.conf I don't even know about it 'cause I never needed it.) > > P. > > -- > pir pir@pir.net pir@net.tufts.edu > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message -- "Brian, the man from babble-on" bts@babbleon.org Brian T. Schellenberger http://www.babbleon.org Support http://www.eff.org. Support decss defendents. Support http://www.programming-freedom.org. Boycott amazon.com. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3AAF77CD.5B204389>