FreeBSD Installer Bug
I came across a known bug in the FreeBSD installer for the first time today.
During the text network install (using the netboot iso) I had problems resolving the hostname of my chosen FTP mirror. The installer hung for an age trying to connect.
Assuming I had a made a typo in the network config, I ctrl+c’d the installer and chose to restart the install process when prompted.
This time round I connected and started retrieving package sets correctly – maybe I did make that typo after all.
However in the half dozen or so times I rebooted the server and restarted the install completely from scratch – I received various different errors ranging from simple ‘disk full’ messages to ‘unable to create symlink’ errors and even ‘no free inodes’ !
I was working remotely over a KVMoIP at the time and was starting to fret I had hardware issues on the other end of the line.
This belief was also founded on receiving the notorious disk geometry error from the installer during the partitioning stage. This is a long standing ‘issue’ and these days really means very little (in fact I believe it is being supressed as of FreeBSD 8? Finally!) and from past experience usually presents no problem – but there is always a nagging doubt – especially if more things go wrong!
However it turns out I had fallen foul of yet another long standing bug in the installer. This time if ctrl+c’ing out the installer and restarting (without rebooting) the next time round the installation attempts to write to the ramdisk instead of your allocated spinning disk – which obviously fills up very quickly and soon gives a variety of disk full errors!
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=bin/45565
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=42162&cat=bin
These reports are dated 2002! and still this issue remains.
The solution is to point the installer to the IP address of the FTP server and bypass the icky host resolution.
FreeBSD has a ‘notorious’ reputation for being very hardware picky which, in actual fact, is quite far from the truth these days. Whilst not matching Linux, support is very good – certainly when compared to OpenSolaris. However I can’t help but wonder if these two very long standing features / bugs which present themselves very quickly during the already outdated (by modern standards) install procedure, cause people to instantly assume there is a support issue with their disk and / or controller and thus to move on (quite speedily I would warrant) from FreeBSD.
There is constant talk of a revamped installer but as of yet no sign. Let’s hope FreeBSD 8 brings some improvement.
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