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Here is a startup script I wrote called /usr/local/etc/rc.d/updown. It emails the root user (and assumes useful forwarding) with info about who rebooted / halted / powered off the system, and after a boot reports how long the system took to reboot (or if it was a crash restart). You'll want to...

If you're asking how to find which passN device is your tape drive, do a camcontrol devlist Depending on the card and driver you have, you may need to do something "special" to get the /dev/passN devices to appear. If the drive is behind a RAID controller, you're probably out of luck. Here's...

I'm sure some do. You don't even need someone on the same continent as long as the remote console is available. If booting from CD, it doesn't have any knowledge of your network configuration. If you can mount the / filesystem, look in /etc/rc.conf for something like this...

Probably a CD image. I believe 11.1 has been EoL for 4+ years at this point. Unless there is a specific reason not to, I suggest trying with the latest RELEASE version (13.1 as of today, the tentative schedule for 13.2 is late March 2023). If you can mount the filesystem from a newer version of...

"Way back when" (4BSD) multiple fsck runs could sometimes be required. That was generally because when fsck fixed things in one pass, it might trigger detection of other errors in a prior pass, requiring multiple runs to have the filesystem marked "clean". 2BSD actually requires you to...

Each FreeBSD release has a stated End-of-Life date. These can be found either here or here. Having said that, the kernel isn't supposed to just panic in most cases. Other than hardware failures, ideally problems should be detected and reported with a concise error message, and if the kernel...

It is more like 30 years ago - /usr/src/usr.sbin/cron/doc/README says: I guess the question is how much divergence there has been since it was imported, and if using a newer version of cron is likely to cause any breaking changes. That would need to be tested on 12.3, 13.x and HEAD. I'll...

Exactly - the transport rate is sometimes reported as the lowest speed supported by the particular technology if the driver doesn't know how to query the actual rate. Years (decades!) ago, I went through the BSD/OS sources and fixed all of them to report the actual port speed. It was a huge...

sg seems to be there for Linux compatibility. The top of /usr/src/sys/cam/scsi/scsi_sg.c says "This driver is meant to implement the Linux * SG passthrough interface for SCSI." The FreeBSD native method would be a pass device. You should get one automatically when your tape drive is...

The closest you could get "out of the box" would be a (much) older FreeBSD release on an Alpha. According to this, FreeBSD 6.4 was the last release to support the Alpha architecture. Even if any of these were possible, the slowest low-end x86-64 notebook available today would far outperform an...

Yes. As a major example, there are 25 instances of mergemaster and 0 of etcupdate. I sent the following to freebsd-doc@ back in June 2021. Hopefully these suggestions are being / will be considered for future Handbook editions. In https://tinyurl.com/45wtwnby (and surrounding replies) I noted...

I think that what is going on is that Linux is putting the MII / PHY in a state that neither the BIOS nor the FreeBSD driver can overcome. If it always works from a cold power-on it isn't the DHCP server or the cable. Arguably, it is the job of the BIOS / card firmware to get things back to a...

Did you see the timestamp on that file? 2021-Jan-24 06:33, confirmed by checking the internal creation timestamp of the PDF version. The downloadable documentation has been getting stale for nearly a year. Way-back-when I had a discussion with someone involved and the info I got was "toolchain...

Some combination of replication and backup will likely be needed. Here are the sections of my 'zilla articles discussing this: RAIDzilla II RAIDzilla 2.5 for those that don't want to read the whole sections, the executive summary is replication to identical hardware at another site with...

That doesn't surprise me - in order to meet modern performance specs, things need to be pretty well balanced within the drive. The days of a giant unbalanced head driven through a metal ribbon from a stepper motor are long gone. The Atasi drive I mentioned was the only 5.25" ST506 drive ever...

The use case mentioned in the OP shouldn't need anywhere near that number of drives, fortunately. While 8TB drives were still rather cutting edge when I built my 'zillas, these days drives of up to 20TB each are available. Some years ago on eBay there were a large number of 60-drive enclosures...

There is no one generic "best" configurations - those articles serve as reasonable guidelines to start with, but if maximum performance is a requirement, various configurations will need to be tried to find out what works best on a specific set of hardware and data. Having said that, it is...

In addition to the expander (BE) and individual (TQ) backplanes, they have the BA multi-lane backplanes. That gets you down to 4 cables. Those may no longer be a "standard configuration" shown on their website, but do seem to be orderable from distributors (for example, CSE-836BA-R920B).

5.5 years ago when I built the RAIDzilla 2.5 systems everything except the drives came to $2815. That's with eBay parts, a few of them used. If these are being built for a business, that might not be acceptable. However, with 6 'zilla 2.5 systems running 24/7 over 5.5 years, I haven't had any...

I did various tuning when I first set up the 'zillas, but as I mentioned that was 5.5 years ago. Things have changed in the meantime (a couple of major FreeBSD kernel versions, switching to OpenZFS, etc.). I'd hesitate to say "this is the one true way". Having said that, I'm still running the...