Long Day's Journey into <Bleep>

[Gary Kline]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 08:10:05AM +0200, C. P. Ghost wrote:
> Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:10:05 +0200
> From: "C. P. Ghost" <cpghost at cordula.ws>
> Subject: Re: Long Day's Journey into <Bleep>
> To: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> 
> On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 5:53 AM, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 05:56:59PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm still bringing back the dozens of things I removed from ethic.
> >> And testing new ideas.  But I have a general question: have any of
> >> you wizards who run your own domains or otherwise use a switch [or
> >> hub] *ever* had it just-quit?!  It is solid-state.  Yes, the box is
> >> within my feet/foot reach.  I have accidently kicked it i suppose,
> >> but still.
> >
> > I think I've just had ports die one by one on a switch until it no longer
> > worked.  I don't think I've ever had the whole thing go poof for no
> > evident reason.
> 
> Same here... a lot of times.
> 
> My last experience with a dying port on a switch was a few days ago
> while JumpStart-ing Solaris via OBP. The process hung everywhere
> from RARP, BOOTP, TFTP and NFS... until we figured out the port
> on the switch was slowly dying.
> 
> Funny thing was that this problem was masked by TCP's error correction
> mechanisms for quite some time and became only critical with UDP: the
> TCP connections were slow as hell, but since the machine wasn't used for
> high throughput anyway, the local junior admin assumed it was some kind
> of software/hardware error on the host. She saw the many input errors (Ierrs)
> in netstat -i, but didn't know what to do about them. ;-)
> 
> So yes, switches rarely stop altogether, the ports usually degrade, one
> by one.
> 
> > Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
> 
> -cpghost.
> 
> -- 
> Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/

	I was fighting a very long left un-upgraded 7.3 on my server one
	day; and the next morning, nothing worked!  But finally, after
	pulling out my one remaining hair, I figured it out.  And now I
	know enough to have a spare switch nearby.  Like Al Plant
	mentioned, up-queue.  

	I just cron'd portupgrade to run more frequently [with pkgdb
	following].  Etc.  Been doing this for a long time but there are
	always new things to learn.

-- 
 Gary Kline  kline at thought.org  http://www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
           Journey Toward the Dawn, E-Book: http://www.thought.org
          The 8.51a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org