Solved I think that I have met my match

drhowarddrfine said:
Learning from experience. That's how most of us became adept at FreeBSD and most things in life.
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The funny things is, I feel like I just wrecked my automobile by getting into a catastrophically bad traffic accident, but then suddenly my vehicle was repaired with just few simple twists of a wrench. I'm sure I learned a lot from this experience, but did I learn everything that I should have? I guess I will find out.
 
Maturin said:
You made it to level 3.
Welcome to the show, buddy!
You are now an official FreeBSD user.
:cool:
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Am I an official FreeBSD user, or is FreeBSD abusing me? One thing is for sure, I need to be less of a cry baby next time my system breaks.
 
Cedric62 said:
is FreeBSD abusing me? One thing is for sure, I need to be less of a cry baby next time my system breaks.
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AFAIK FreeBSD is not abusing you in a kind like other OSs abuse their users.
Cry baby? What cry baby? 😁
You had a prob, you asked the community, you solved it.
Cry babies just drop bombs and are never seen again, not solving, not learning anything - maybe are back to Windows... 😂
As I said in my first post, everybody had some kind of a breakdown at least once like that: You might think you know how to deal with this shit, but then suddenly it's fokked up, and you realized, you fokked it up yourself, because there still was an important lesson you did not learned yet so far.
Now you learned it.
And such things need a let out, of course - what you did by starting this thread.
At the same time you would not have started this thread - took the time to write an elaborated OP - if you really were dumping FreeBSD, jut dropping a bomb. I've seen some guys here, just dropping their shit bomb and never been seen again. But those don't take their time to really describe their prob, searching contact, asking really for help, by the community.
You did.
I'm pretty sure there was something deep inside you saying, 'yeah, fokk, fokk, fokkshit, BUT - wait a second. cool down! first listen, what the others tell. Let's solve that shit!'
And you did.
And that's exactly the difference between some one just taking a peek, and some one really got into FreeBSD.
Welcome.
In your other thread you reviewed in detail what caused your prob and how you solved it. That's engineering: find and document the problem and its solution. 👍

So, lesson learned:
1777666978378.png

There is always a solution, 'cause you are using FreeBSD.
🤓😎
 
Cedric62 said:
But if I were to make such a modification to my .xinitrc, would I still be able to use Xfce? At first I didn't like Xfce too much, but now that I've managed to tweak it a little bit, I'm starting to think that Xfce might be better for someone like me, than Cinnamon is. Also, I really wanted to install KDE, but I think that I read somewhere that some of the BSD distros might be ending support for it? At any rate, I now seem to have a stable installation of FreeBSD again, so I guess that I'm going to try sticking with it.
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Sure ! I was just indicating that you should "pick a desired X Windows desktop and place the initialization into your .xinitrc" file. I am running XFCE as well at this time -- XFCE is a great desktop.

Awesome that you have a stable FreeBSD again !
 
Maturin said:
You had a prob, you asked the community, you solved it.
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I agree with everything you said, but in this case the only reason I was able to get my system back was because I happened to have another hard drive with a duplicate installation of FreeBSD on it, and I was able to clone that drive to my ada0 drive. Not exactly a skillful way of solving the problem, but it did return my system to a stable state, and from there I was able to somewhat figure things out on my own.

So, did I really solve a problem, or was I just lucky to have a duplicate hard drive that I could use to restore my system? If I encounter such a problem again, my plan will be to get into the second terminal and to mount my second internal hard drive. From there I'm planning to use package delete to remove the bad Nvidia driver, and then I from there I will try to add the correct working Nvidia driver from the backup pkg folder located on my second internal hard drive. However, if that doesn't work, I still have the option of doing a fresh reinstall, and then using my restore script to restore my settings and packages. I tried this option yesterday,and it worked!
 
CShell said:
I am running XFCE as well at this time -- XFCE is a great desktop
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I agree. I've managed to make my installation of Xfce look a little bit like Windows 9x, and I feel comfortable with it. Now I'm wondering how I can remove my other desktop, Cinnamon , without completely destabilizing my system? Or maybe I should just leave it as it is for now?
 
Cedric62 said:
in this case the only reason I was able to get my system back was because
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You solved it. How is secondary.
Cedric62 said:
but it did return my system to a stable state
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That's the only point counts.
Cedric62 said:
and from there I was able to somewhat figure things out on my own.
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That's how you gain more skill, which will not only prevent you from repeating the same mistake again, but develop more and better ways to deal with problems more elegant in the future.
You obeyed rule #1: Do have backups!
Something sometimes one still read things about like, '*sigh* those old farts mirthing with boring backups again.'
It's for sure no thrilling topic, but it's important. As long as you have reliable BUs you can trust, you can act way more relaxed, since you are aware of if desaster strikes there is a safe resort you can fall back on in worst case anytime. Worst thing can happen at all is, you need to restore from BU, so what!
Your next steps will contain to realize better, more sophisticated, more nuanced BU strategies. You said yourself you already do so. You "passed basic class on core fundamentals". Congrats.
Now comes your personal, individual, infinite adventure of all the countless details you want to learn, realize, improve. Now you can venture to put more effort and learning in your system, do more challenging things, make it bigger, make it more complex, make it more valuable, because you don't need to fear to lose it all suddenly again somehow, and start all over by scratch again, maybe even change the OS again.
That is the crucial step ascending from a peeking newby to a sophisticated user.
 
Maturin said:
That's the only point counts.
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I guess that you're right. However, I wonder how I would have solved my black screen problem, if I didn't have a duplicate installation on a spare drive sitting on my closet shelf? I guess that I would have figured it out, but it would have taken me a day or two longer in order to get back to a stable system.
 
Maturin said:
I still stumble over the "everything"
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I've included a copy of two batch files that I use in order to backup and restore my installation. Also, it appears that LibreOffice is installed into /usr/local/bin, or at least that is the way it appears on my system.

Below used to copy to backup:
Code: 
#!/bin/sh
# USING RSYNC TO BACKUP AND RESTORE SYSTEM DIRECTORIES

# +++ Copy settings and home directory to backup: +++

mkdir -p /diskbkp/backup

# Prepare a list of installed packages with below command:
pkg prime-list > /diskbkp/backup/packagelist.txt

mkdir -p /diskbkp/backup/boot
mkdir -p /diskbkp/backup/usr/local
mkdir -p /diskbkp/backup/home
mkdir -p /diskbkp/backup/etc
mkdir -p /diskbkp/backup/var/cache/pkg

# COPY SYSTEM DIRECTORIES

rsync -avhpo --progress /boot/loader.conf /diskbkp/backup/boot
rsync -avhpo --progress /usr/local/etc /diskbkp/backup/usr/local
rsync -avhpo --progress /home /diskbkp/backup/
rsync -avhpo --progress /etc /diskbkp/backup/
# rsync -avhpo --progress /var/cache/pkg /diskbkp/backup/var/cache
pkg create -a -o /diskbkp/backup/var/cache/pkg
echo "Script finished."

The below is used to restore from backup, including my packages:
Code: 
#!/bin/sh
# Restore from USB:

# Install FreeBSD in the usual way then use below commands to restore settings & home directory:

# RESTORE SYSTEM DIRECTORIES

rsync -avhpo --progress /diskbkp/backup/boot/loader.conf /boot
rsync -avhpo --progress /diskbkp/backup/usr/local/etc /usr/local
rsync -avhpo --progress /diskbkp/backup/home /
rsync -avhpo --progress /diskbkp/backup/etc /

pkg add /diskbkp/backup/var/cache/pkg/*

echo "Script finished."

I know that the above isn't perfect, but for now it seems to work well enough until I learn more. At least it gives me the ability to make my system stable and bootable, again, if I happen to fat finger it to death.
 
Cedric62 said:
I wonder how I would have solved my black screen problem, if I didn't have a duplicate installation on a spare drive sitting on my closet shelf?
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That worked for you "this time" - and that is good !

But going forward you should seriously consider looking at using ZFS snapshots instead. (See my early post on this).
 
CShell said:
you should seriously consider looking at using ZFS snapshots instead.
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I may have to do that, but I think that I may wait until I replace the hard drives in side my computer. I did try ZFS when I tried Ghost last week, but under ZFS my system seemed a bit slow and laggy compared to UFS, but I know that eventually I will have to go with ZFS instead.

At the moment, I now have three internal hard drives with identical installations of FreeBSD on them. (There is only one installation inside my machine on ada0, and the other two drives are sitting inside a cardboard box on a shelf.) I want to make sure that I understand this Nvidia problem very well, so this coming weekend I plan on installing one of those drives as ada0, and then running the package upgrade command to see what happens. I fully expect to get a black screen instead of my login screen, and from there I will try to use the terminal to remove the bad Nividia driver, and to add a replacement driver from the backup folder I created a few days ago.

If I'm successful, then that would give me a quicker method of recover than doing a full reinstall and restoring from a backup using rsync. If that works, then I suppose that I should learn how ports work, and then maybe after that I will consider getting two new hard drives, and going with ZFS.
 
zfs is kind of heavy on system with less RAM. you prob want to fine tune the kernel zfs ARC min max value if you use it on limited system. I have 32GB ram, still i see the wired memory use more than 60% before fine-tuning, after fine-tune it run so smooth with ram usage around 8GB.

Hope that helps.
 
Cedric62 said:
the other two drives are sitting inside a cardboard box on a shelf.
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There were times when I wished I just put all my components onto a board without a case. All parts are easily accessible when you want to swap things around or experiment. It's just inconvenient most of the time and takes up too much space in an office.

One place I worked at, a guy had his motherboard screwed into the side of his desk for the same reasons.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
There were times when I wished I just put all my components onto a board without a case. All parts are easily accessible when you want to swap things around or experiment. It's just inconvenient most of the time and takes up too much space in an office.

One place I worked at, a guy had his motherboard screwed into the side of his desk for the same reasons.
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Or maybe a hinged case with a latch, maybe something like they would use on an industrial electrical panel. Hmmm....
 
claudiuschan said:
zfs is kind of heavy on system with less RAM. you prob want to fine tune the kernel zfs ARC min max value if you use it on limited system. I have 32GB ram, still i see the wired memory use more than 60% before fine-tuning, after fine-tune it run so smooth with ram usage around 8GB.

Hope that helps.
Click to expand...
According to the below information I got from neofetch, it looks like my computer only has a total of only 8GB system RAM. So based upon what neofetch says, is it still a good idea to use ZFS on my system?

Code: 
OS: FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE-p8 amd64
Uptime: 10 hours, 18 mins
Packages: 1225 (pkg)
Shell: sh
Resolution: 1920x1080
DE: Xfce 4.20
WM: Xfwm4
WM Theme: Default
Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3]
Icons: elementary-xfce [GTK2/3]
Terminal: xfce4-terminal
Terminal Font: Monospace 12
CPU: Intel Pentium Gold G5400 (4) @ 3.700GHz
GPU: GP108 [GeForce GT 1030]
Memory: 2581MiB / 8075MiB
 
Cedric62 said:
According to the below information I got from neofetch, it looks like my computer only has a total of only 8GB system RAM. So based upon what neofetch says, is it still a good idea to use ZFS on my system?

Code: 
OS: FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE-p8 amd64
Uptime: 10 hours, 18 mins
Packages: 1225 (pkg)
Shell: sh
Resolution: 1920x1080
DE: Xfce 4.20
WM: Xfwm4
WM Theme: Default
Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3]
Icons: elementary-xfce [GTK2/3]
Terminal: xfce4-terminal
Terminal Font: Monospace 12
CPU: Intel Pentium Gold G5400 (4) @ 3.700GHz
GPU: GP108 [GeForce GT 1030]
Memory: 2581MiB / 8075MiB
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Hi, my view is it still good enough to run ZFS file system. Except those single board computers like Rasberry Pi, which probably better of with UFS.

There is a someone in this forum actually ask about the concern of "zfs" memory requirements.

A guy limit the ZFS RAM usage to 512MB, and still run great for desktop.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/zfs-memory-requirements.87473/post-592323
 
I think that I have figured something else out, and I thought that I had this problem fixed before, but every once in a while it seems to creep back on its own.

Usually if I type service status dbus, I usually get a return of something like dbus is pid 2985. I don't happen to have a good example in front of me, but I know it was something very similar to this.

However, now when I try the same command, I get the below result.
su
Code: 
root@Asus:/home/Simon # service status dbus
status does not exist in /etc/rc.d or the local startup
directories (/usr/local/etc/rc.d), or is not executable
root@Asus:/home/Simon #

I have verified that dbus is located within the two paths listed above, and I have also verified that it is listed within my

Below is what I have listed within my /etc/rc.conf file regarding dbus.

Code: 
# Desktop & System Services
dbus_enable="YES"
# hald_enable="YES"
lightdm_enable="YES"
moused_enable="YES"
webcamd_enable="YES"
cupsd_enable="YES"
avahi_daemon_enable="YES"

Well, I think that this intermittent dbus problem is at the heart of all of my problems, but I cannot figure out what is causing it to come and go?
 
drhowarddrfine said:
There were times when I wished I just put all my components onto a board without a case. All parts are easily accessible when you want to swap things around or experiment. It's just inconvenient most of the time and takes up too much space in an office.

One place I worked at, a guy had his motherboard screwed into the side of his desk for the same reasons.
Click to expand...
I worked with a guy who took a picture off the wall to build a computer on. He was in a hurry.
 
Well, when I assembled the desktop that I'm now using, back in 2019 or so, I was living in a warmer climate, so I wanted to do as much as I could to prevent heat build up inside the case.

So, before I stuffed my new motherboard inside the case, I got a 1/16" drill bit, and I drilled a bunch of tiny holes in a circle on the top of my case. Next I used a chisel to cut between the holes I drilled, and after that I half round single cut file to smooth out the inside diameter of the large hole I made. I salvaged the grill from a broken power supply, painted it red so that I would remember not to put anything on top of my computer, and I added some hardware cloth on the inside (similar to fly screen) to keep lizards from getting inside my case. Yes, that was an actual problem where I used to live (Cebu City).

91.jpg


I also used the shell of the broken power supply as a template to drill ventilation holes into one of my side panels (just below the CPU) that way I was think the tray holding my motherboard might get some cooler air underneath it.

93.jpg
 
CShell said:
The issue is that you want:

$ service dbus status dbus is running as pid 1000. $
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Okay, now things are really getting weird. Below is what I'm now getting.

Code: 
root@Asus:/home/Simon # service dbus start
dbus already running?  (pid=2969).
root@Asus:/home/Simon # service dbus status
dbus is running as pid 2969.
root@Asus:/home/Simon #

Code: 
Simon@Asus:~ $ service dbus status
dbus is running as pid 3004.
Is it normal for the pid number to change every time I log in and out?

Also, it seems that something keeps removing the executable from the file /etc/rc.d/dbus, then when I reset it with chmod, dbus seems to work again. Oh well, not as bad as last week's black screen I guess.
 
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