Hello fellow FreeBSD users and experts,
I have been using FreeBSD for some time now. I have some background in Unix and I found it very familiar in many ways. In comparison to Linux, I like FreeBSD being very straightforward.
I am using FreeBSD 12.2 for a home server and I ran into a strange problem. The server will go offline (lost network connectivity) for some time, and then resume. I suspect it is related to memory management. But during the time period that the system goes offline, the log does not show anything. My question hence is, what debugging/logging can I enable so that I can see what happened?
This is an Azulle Byte 3 mini computer with 4GB memory. I have the FreeBSD OS installed on its built-in 32GB eMMC disk. I have another mechanical hard drive attached to the system. The hard drive is in one ZFS pool. On the system, I have Samba and Syncthing installed. I created two virtual machines using Bhyve to run Pi-Hole. I also have a jail to run Transmission. In terms of networking, I created a virtual bridge (bridge0) that includes the main NIC (re0), two tap interfaces for the virtual machines, and an epair interface for the jail.
The system has worked fine almost all the time. It is not a high stress system. But occasionally, it will become unresponsive for some time. It is like once or twice in a week. It may last 15 to 30 minutes. During this time, ping returns host down. Then it comes back online as if nothing has happened. I checked the system log (/var/log/messages). No information is there. The syncthing log shows that it failed to connect to other servers, indicating that network connectivity was lost for some time. I also checked the system log in the virtual machines. They are Debian systems. They are also like nothing ever happened.
I read somewhere that if FreeBSD runs into memory shortage, it will try to page memory to disk. Processes may hang after trying to access the disk for more than 20 seconds. It may resume once the paging is finally done. Revise the default vfs.zfs.arc_max parameter (75% of available memory) may help. So I changed it to be 2147483648 (2GB). With this change, it seems this lost connectivity thing happens less frequently. But it still happens.
I am not sure if it is the reason. But my challenge is that I need to get some information first. How can I obtain more information about this offline period? No network access. Attaching a monitor only gives a blank screen.
Thanks much!
I have been using FreeBSD for some time now. I have some background in Unix and I found it very familiar in many ways. In comparison to Linux, I like FreeBSD being very straightforward.
I am using FreeBSD 12.2 for a home server and I ran into a strange problem. The server will go offline (lost network connectivity) for some time, and then resume. I suspect it is related to memory management. But during the time period that the system goes offline, the log does not show anything. My question hence is, what debugging/logging can I enable so that I can see what happened?
This is an Azulle Byte 3 mini computer with 4GB memory. I have the FreeBSD OS installed on its built-in 32GB eMMC disk. I have another mechanical hard drive attached to the system. The hard drive is in one ZFS pool. On the system, I have Samba and Syncthing installed. I created two virtual machines using Bhyve to run Pi-Hole. I also have a jail to run Transmission. In terms of networking, I created a virtual bridge (bridge0) that includes the main NIC (re0), two tap interfaces for the virtual machines, and an epair interface for the jail.
The system has worked fine almost all the time. It is not a high stress system. But occasionally, it will become unresponsive for some time. It is like once or twice in a week. It may last 15 to 30 minutes. During this time, ping returns host down. Then it comes back online as if nothing has happened. I checked the system log (/var/log/messages). No information is there. The syncthing log shows that it failed to connect to other servers, indicating that network connectivity was lost for some time. I also checked the system log in the virtual machines. They are Debian systems. They are also like nothing ever happened.
I read somewhere that if FreeBSD runs into memory shortage, it will try to page memory to disk. Processes may hang after trying to access the disk for more than 20 seconds. It may resume once the paging is finally done. Revise the default vfs.zfs.arc_max parameter (75% of available memory) may help. So I changed it to be 2147483648 (2GB). With this change, it seems this lost connectivity thing happens less frequently. But it still happens.
I am not sure if it is the reason. But my challenge is that I need to get some information first. How can I obtain more information about this offline period? No network access. Attaching a monitor only gives a blank screen.
Thanks much!