The FreeBSD Diary

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Thanks Joe.

When I came into work last Thursday morning, I noticed that my PC (Compaq Deskpro 2000), running FreeBSD 3.4 was at the login prompt and my WIN NT machine was at the boot up password.  I realized then that the inevitable had happened....Power Outage!  Thinking that power outages/cold reboots meant death to most UNIX systems, I hurried to prevent this from happening again and hooked up an APC Smart-UPS 1000 that we had sitting in one of our storage closets.  Hooking it up to my FreeBSD machine was easy enough. I just plugged the power cord into a receptacle and then plugged the power from the CPU and monitor into the back of the UPS.  I finished by attaching the serial cable on the UPS to the serial port on the back of the CPU (COM1) - there is only one serial port available for Compaq Deskpro's.  After hooking it up, I realized that I would need to install some software that could communicate with the UPS through the serial line and allow me to do a graceful shutdown in the event of power loss.   I went to APC's web site and though they had their Powerchute software available for many commercial versions of UNIX, I didn't see anything that was designed specifically for any of the BSDs.  They even had a Linux version and I learned later that at least one person was running this successfully under Linux emulation on his FreeBSD 3.4 system.   I didn't want to run this under Linux emulation if I didn't have to.  Later, I came across an application in the ports collection called UPSD - 2.0 that seemed to be designed specifically to work with the APC Smart-UPS models. I loaded the 4th CD from the CD ROM set and from /usr/ports/sysutils/upsd/ I typed make install and installed it.  I noticed that there wasn't any documentation included with this port, not even a man page.  It loaded only 2 files, the upsd executable in /usr/local/sbin and the configuration file (upsd.conf) in /usr/local/etc.  I su'd to root and attempted to spawn the daemon by cd'ng to /usr/local/sbin and typing # ./upsd.  At this point, my whole system locked up tighter than a drum!  I couldn't kill X and couldn't switch to another terminal.  Nothing!   I had to cold-reboot my system again!  After I booted back up, I looked at my logs and noticed a message indicating there was a permission problem with /dev/cuaa0. This device is owned by uucp and belongs to the dialer group.  I su'd to root again and adjusted the permissions so that other users would have access and then tried to execute the program again.  Same thing happened, complete lockup!  At this point, I was pretty frustrated and none the information I had read in my books or the answers I received from posting to FreeBSD-Questions seemed to help.  I cd'd to /usr/ports/sysutils/upsd and typed make deinstall and went home.

When I came in Friday morning, I noticed an email from someone who said they were using a port called UPSMON - 2.1.3 with an APC Smart-UPS on their FreeBSD system without any problems.  This port wasn't on the CD ROM set, so when I installed it, it had to fetch it from an ftp site.  No problem, right?  Wrong!  I installed this port and decided to reboot. Big mistake! Now, during boot-up, my system would just hang at:

local package initialization: Cannot open /dev/cuaa0: 
                            Permission denied upsmond

After hearing the voice of Ralph from the Simpsons in my head, going Ha! Ha!.., I thought, now what do I do!  After going through all my books and documentation and trying to boot into single-user mode, fixit mode from the 2nd cd in the cd rom set and even from kernel.GENERIC, I realized I wasn't getting anywhere.  My machine would always hang when trying to launch the upsmond daemon during boot up.  As a last resort, I posted to FreeBSD-Questions and got the answer I was looking for.  I was told to go into single-user mode.  At the beginning of the boot-up process, there is a ten second count down that tells you to either hit enter or wait for the count down to finish for system boot-up.  Before the counter finishes, you hit the space bar and you're presented with a prompt where you can specify different boot options.  I specified boot -s for single user mode.  In The Complete FreeBSD, it tells you to boot into single-user mode and run fsck on / by issuing: fsck -y / <cr> I ran this on / and /dev/wd0s1a.  Then it tells you to mount / by typing: mount -u /.  I did this and it let me mount it.  Lastly, it says to mount /usr by typing: mount /usr.  It would let me mount this but only with read access.  I needed write access so that I could go into /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ and either remove or change the upsmond.sh file which was causing my system to hang.  I got a response from someone telling me to mount /usr by typing the following: mount -rwf /usr.  This worked and I was able to edit upsmond.sh so that it was pointing to /dev/cuaa1 and not cuaa0.  This got my system booting.  I found out later that I could have successfully mounted /usr with r/w access if I would have first fsck'd it by issuing: fsck -y /usr (I probably should have done this for /var too).

I got my system booting again (whew!) but still haven't figured out why /dev/cuaa0 causes problems.  I seems as if some kind of conflict is going on, maybe something else is using this device?  I haven't found the answer to this yet.  I got an email response back from APC, saying they did have an application that would work with FreeBSD but I would need to purchase their Simple UNIX Serial cable for $39.00 in order for it to work.  So, now I don't know if it's a device conflict or the cable but I doubt I'll shell out the money for a new cable.  Maybe my manager will let me order it and reimburse me?

I've always thought that cold reboot/shutdowns were death to UNIX systems, especially if you did it more than 5 or 6 times.  I've completely trashed my systems this way when I was using Red Hat 6.x and Caldera 2.x in the past.  Cold booted more than 5 times and got the dreaded "kernel panic" message and had to reinstall.  I ended up cold booting my FreeBSD system more than 12 times the last couple of days and it's still going! 8^).  So, the moral of this story?  FreeBSD is forgiving, you just need to tell it how to forgive you!

And...forgive me for such a long story... 8^}

Joe

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FreeBSD = The Power to Serve ..Simply put = FreeBSD Rocks!