OpenBSD 4.2
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Last thursday OpenBSD 4.2 was released and yesterday I took the opportunity to install it on my quite famous fileserver. Part of the reason to do that was to see if my how-to was still valid (and it is!) but also because I had some specific problems with OpenBSD 4.0 I was running on there and the packaged Samba, 3.0.21bp4. Now I could’ve upgraded to 4.1 a long time ago (and I should’ve!), but it wasn’t clear to me from the start what was happening. I could’ve recompiled a new Samba also, but somehow on OpenBSD-machines I like to stick to the package-collection. So, a fresh install of OpenBSD 4.2 it was!
From my media center which runs Vista I could browse my fileserver, although on some occassions, my fileserver would completely crash. Now I think this had to do with the Vista-machine doing fast-queries on the Samba fileserver. There’s more about that here.
It would happen during large filetransfers, but not when playing MP3s for instance or playing videos… Downpoint was, since I run softraid, after a crash the parity needed to recalculate and I wanted to do filechecks of all the filesystems (and on my fileserver, that’s one on the other…) before I put it back up, which in all would take several hours to complete.
Now a sureshot way to crash the fileserver was to go into a directory full of rar-files, open it on the Vista-machine, and put the decoded output back onto my fileserver. I just tested that on the 4.2 machine which has Samba 3.0.25b and now everything goes like it should.
Well, because of the fresh OS-install, I also swapped a 9GB SCSI-disk on an Adaptec 2940 for a 180GB one (I never knew they existed!) on an Adaptec 29160N SCSI-card. And about the drive… well, I have that one for ages already and thought it was an 18GB-drive. That’s how I bought it also… but when I partitioned the drive I became suspicious and after googling I found out that it’s a 180GB-drive instead of an 18GB one… It’s old but unused (and therefore probably has quite some life left in it), like a lot of my stuff ^_^
With my fileserver on OpenBSD 4.2 I guess I finished the OS-upgrade-cycle for now. My workstation now runs Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, my old powerbook now runs Leopard and my media center still runs Vista, although the way I use the latter I guess it’s the worlds most bloated MP3-player… I really should do something about that one day. *^_^*
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Yeah I’ve seen one of those drives, too on ebay the other day and thought it was a mistake. Didn’t really believe they existed. Good to know they do though cause that bitch was cheap ^^ (probably because most people thought it didn’t exist)