FreeBSD 8.0 in the house

By finndo On March 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

So, (yes it is about 2:30am for me right now, had a small (=98 or 99 for me normal is mid 96 or low 97 degree temp) fever last night, ate some food I should have not and spent about 45 minutes in the bathroom about an hour ago… not sitting…) [...]

So, (yes it is about 2:30am for me right now, had a small (=98 or 99 for me normal is mid 96 or low 97 degree temp) fever last night, ate some food I should have not and spent about 45 minutes in the bathroom about an hour ago… not sitting…) I completed the installation following the guide I mentioned in my FreeBSD and VMWare post a week or two ago, but I was so intent on the guide I forgot to mark the main HDD slice as bootable, and then it was all down hill from there.  the FreeBSD bootloader failed to locate a kernel and it was a real mess.  I have done this in the past and never really figured out how to resolve it without reinstalling.  The best I can tell you is what I just did…

 

  1. reboot from the install CD
  2. go into the post-configuration menu and select fdisk
  3. select the slice you installed root on “/”
  4. press “s” to make it bootable, should make a “A” appear next to it
  5. go into the label editor and go to each mount and press “m” and enter the mount point (make sure it is the same as the last time you ran setup, should be ”/” “/usr” “/var” ”/tmp” in that order if you want to have a happy and long life :)
  6. then go add some random package doesn’t matter what
  7. select commit, it will make the HDD partition changes and add the random package
  8. exit out and reboot

 

Now somehow I missed the network card config (probably because I was halfway through the install when my wife dragged me out to watch her drink green beer.  granted I had a good time up until about 1am this morning in the bathroom.  fyi I only had 1 beer, so the beer did not make me sick (it was not green!), it had to be the sandwich, which btw was good the first time…), so when I rebooted (and it did work after that) I had no IP addy. SO, back into the setup app

 

  1. type sysinstall
  2. go to configure ”post install configuration”
  3. networking
  4. interfaces “configure additional networking interfaces”
  5. answer the questions

 

ok, now I have everything up and running, followed a link in the guide I was following to “what to do first after installing FreeBSD” basically gives you the commands to enter to update the system and the ports tree.

 

So, the next step in the guide has you setup and run dbus, which promptly gave me an error about not having it’s user ID’s configured correctly (I blame my shotty installation technique… :P   )  fixable by going here, which by the way does say that the issue is from my nuked /etc/passwd file when I reran setup.  This is bad, because I will be seeing more errors from this in the future… maybe I should nuke and restart before I get too far in?

 

I wish I did not have nearly everything I own stuffed in plastic tubs and sitting in a storage unit right now… I used to have a cheat sheet in a small ringed notedbook that had all these neat commands for FreeBSD written out, like how/when to use portupgrade and pkgdb.  so, somehow my brain nearly functioned correctly and reminded me of this. SO I did a quick search from my laptop and found a page on pkgdb which also talks and is linked to a page on portupgrade…

 

I quickly ran pkgdb (if you’ve ever done this on a fresh install you’ll get the joke there, if not pop open virtual box install freebsd and follow allong to get a sense of what makes that funny) and got several issues resolved.

 

First I made sure to install all of these during the system install, as I know I will use them, but here is a list of the commands I have entered (as root) since my system booted for the first time to get it all setup. (in order, don’t know if it is the best order, but it is the order I did it!!)

 

  1. freebsd-update fetch install
  2. portsnap fetch extract
  3. pkgdb -F (this one can take 20 seconds or 2 hours)
  4. cvsup /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h cvsup12.us.freebsd.org (this one is a good one to run over night, or when you have to run out to the store... no prompts and takes a couple of minutes)
  5. cd /var/db
  6. tar cvfz var.db.pkg.[MMDDYYYY].tgz pkg
  7. cd ~ (get back to the root home directory)
  8. portupgrade -ra (this one takes a VERY long time and is directly affected by your internet speed; however you will frequently be prompted for options.  If you know what it is and want it, put an "X" in the box, if not, keep to the defaults and avoid anything marked experimental!)  Total run time 20 hours and it went unattended for up to 3.5 hours 3 times and for 30-50 mins twice. (each time it was sitting at a screen waiting for me when I got back to it)
  9. pkgdb -F (all good, finished in 5 seconds)
  10. cvsup /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h cvsup12.us.freebsd.org (went pretty quick this time, about 3 mins and DID make some more changes.)
  11. portupgrade -ra (finished in less than 10 minutes, but did update on some things and gave me an error "curl does not support both c-ares and IPv6 - disable one of them." apparently I checked to many boxes in the config screen!!  This process moved me from 528 packages installed to 631)
  12. portupgrade -ra (finished in about 15 minutes, but did update on some things AGAIN!)
  13. portupgrade -ra (keep on running it till it doesn't update anything... this run I noticed some errors flying by, and several updates but it only took about 5 mins to complete, maybe there are more, but I am ready to move on... I'll run this every night before I go to bed for a week until it stops updating.)

 

So, now back to the guide, I think I was trying to start dbus... (I borrowed these lines from the forum post linked above to fix my problem with starting dbus)

 

  1. cd /usr/ports/sysutils/policykit/ make deinstall
  2. make install clean
  3. cd /usr/ports/net/avahi-app
  4. make deinstall 
  5. make install clean

 

After that I was able to start both dbus and hald with no errors and the next step of that process was to reboot, so I shall, and then I'll continue this on a new post...

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getting my PC to function…

By finndo On December 28, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Ok, back from vacation, had a good time, now I think I’m sick, sore throat, sinus drainage, coughing (tried to text that word earlier and my phone thought I wanted to say “coffeeing”), stuffy head (more like someone tried to stuff me for thanksgiving dinner…). will give some updates on my [...]

Ok, back from vacation, had a good time, now I think I’m sick, sore throat, sinus drainage, coughing (tried to text that word earlier and my phone thought I wanted to say “coffeeing”), stuffy head (more like someone tried to stuff me for thanksgiving dinner…). will give some updates on my vacation sooner or later, but for now I shall utilize the World Wide Web for what it does best… Immortalizes information. As I can never find the settings for my Motherboard, I will post them here, so I can always find them, I hope…

Right, so first off, I have my replacement MB and I am trying (still) to get it to work. The first issue I am having is that the MB will not POST if I place my ram in either Dual Channel Configuration. (slots 1&2 or slots 3&4, per the MB instructions using slots 3&4 provides the best performance for a 2 DIMM setup, and this is how it was before I sent the MB back to ECS as an RMA). no matter what I do, with 2 DIMM’s installed it will only POST if and only if I place the RAM in slots 1&3 or slots 2&4. No ifs, no ands, and no butts.

So I am dealing with that, I just want the dumb thing to work at this point. I’ve had it since the end of May and it has never worked correctly, so this is a minor inconvenience. I am using slots 1&3 currently.

After setting the date and time in the Standard CMOS setup page (American Megatrends v02.62 BIOS), I skip Advanced setup and go to Advanced Chipset Setup and change the third option for Shared VRAM from “Auto” to 128MB. I do this because it has a 256MB Dedicated Sideboard, and I doubt I need more than that, but just incase… Also (forgot this the first time), I need to change the default startup video “Init Display First” to “OnBoard” from PCI, as I am currently only using the onboard video.

Next, I’ll skip Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, and PCI/PnP Setup, as there are no features in there that I wish to mess with. So, I’ll head on over to PC Health Status and go to choice numero uno “SMART Fan Function” and set “SMART Fan start PWM” value to 50 (I think this is the percent of max RPM the fan will start at) and set “SMART Fan start TEMP.” to 55C, this should allow my CPU fan a chance to stop spinning at some point… maybe. Escape out to go to the second option there “Shutdown Temperature) and change the default setting “Disabled” to “70C/158F” (the minimum) because I want this thing to shutdown quick if something happens, and since it normally runs around 51C/123F CPU and 31C/87F System temp, I have determined that a 20C/35F temp spike is not a good thing and the PC should kill it before it gets any higher. Except when I was messing around with AMD’s Overdrive software for overclocking from within Windows, I have never seen the CPU break 53C so I did base my choice off a researched value, not just at random…

Next victim… “M.I.B. II (MB Intelligent Bios)

this is where I will have to do some trial and error… first off (already been at this for 1.5hrs, fyi) I am not going to change a thing and see if the PC will reboot with the above changes only, then I will stop changing them and just do this part till I can get a reboot again… after which I’ll combine the two parts and try to boot up again, as every time it fails to boot, I have to reset all back to default and start again…

Save and exit… system restarted fine… oh one more thing I am using the HDMI out AND the VGA outputs currently to 2 different TV’s (this is what it would not do before and is the primary reason for the RMA, the HDMI out would crash the PC if the cable was connected to the PC). A quick check shows that everything is exactly as I set it, except the current CPU temp is 50C and the CPU fan is running at 2335RPM…. oh well, maybe I’ll get around to that later… now to play with the MB and RAM settings…

so the PC Health Status page shows my CPU Vcore at 1.344V and the VDIMM at 1.520V. over in the MIB II page it is correctly displaying my processor as a Phenom II x4 955 running at 3200MHz with a NB Clk 2000Mhz. (different than before, but still automatically detected…) it shows my RAM as 533MHz,7,7,7,16,4,27 (previously it showed 533MHz,6,6,6,14,4,20) but this is good, as previously I had to manually change it to 9,9,9,24 in order to get the PC to boot, so I think I will leave it be. ****edit**** the RAM is supposed to be set to 667MHz change made at the bottom****

CPU settings, as most OC websites show this CPU running significantly faster when OC’d (up to 3.8GHz per core), all without special cooling systems or changing the voltage, I think I will bump it some.

first try
x18.5 3700MHz at 1.350V with NB @2000MHz (default). save and exit… reboot successful, I think I’ll leave it there, I don’t need to push it, and if it works, well then it works…

But… I will try bumping the CPU/HT Reference Clock (MHz) from the default of 200 to 225 (based off the results from this review where they bumped it to a whopping 240MHz, they say when you up the HT Ref Clock, it also increases ram speed, HT link speed, and NB (IMC) speed) again, no voltage change was made… and time to reboot… fail to POST

2nd attempt on the HT Ref Clock, (utilizing information from AMD’s employee blogs and this overclocking reviewat AnandTech) 220MHz and +.75mV on the NB, I also bumped the NB Frequency to 2400MHz… time for a reboot… well, the power light came on, but the system did not POST.

setting a base again…
x18.5 3700MHz at 1.350V with NB @2400MHz (default 2000MHz). save and exit… reboot successful, so it would appear that the HT ref clock is killing me…

I set the HT ref clock to 215 and saved and reboot… no good that is… ok then, back to my base (with 2400MHz NB) If I feel like it, I’ll play more with the AMD Overdrive proggy… right now I want to see if my Video works… well failed to boot this time… I did not change any settings from the base, so…

New settings… 3.7GHz, 2.4GHz NB, +80mV to DIMM, +50mV to the NB, and I manually configured my RAM to 667MHz (remember the multiplier…) at 7,7,7,24 lets try that… and we have windows booting… although I think I forgot to set the other BIOS settings… doh!

I also got a BSOD (pre-login screen)… Stop: 0x0000007E (0xFFFFFFFFC0000005, 0xFFFFF80002CDDDA7, 0xFFFFF880037706D8, 0xFFFFF8800376FF30)

Best results I found was a forum post over on Tom’s Hardware… could be the new board?

well, back to 3.6GHz, 2.4GHz, 667MHz,8,8,8,24, +80mV, +50mV…. failed to POST.

trying:  3.7GHz, 2.4GHz, 667MHz,9,9,9,27, +80mV, +50mV… as it is obviously the ram.  I know the voltage is too low, as the BIOS reports it as 800MHZ, not 1333 AND claims the voltage is 1.6, but should be 1.75.  Now if I try to set the voltage above 1.72 it goes red and tells me I am exceeding the safe voltage level for the system… failed to POST.

 

I am beginning to wonder if the dual channel issue may be the culprit at this point…  I am just going to try and get the system to start now and see about a BIOS update… then see what happens… guess I should have held off on OC’ing until I knew it was all working…

settings are at 3.5GHz, 2.2GHz all else default, PC booted, allowed Win7 to go to startup repair mode, pulling a system restore now.  Very confident message… “If system restore was successful, Windows should restart successfully”  well, it’s sitting on the “Starting Windows” screen… and I have a login screen…

 

more later…

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