linux to an imac

2002-10-10 21:11 / .. and back to FreeBSD  »

Silence from me then, for almost a month. I've been busy setting up a new leased server - no, not an Xserve, I no longer have money to burn ;-), but instead an Athlon 1.1Ghz with FreeBSD. Old cpu, but desperately cheap and more than suitable for my purposes of multi-vhosts and multi-domain imap mail. It's the first root access I've had at the end of some decent bandwidth, and it's bloody hard work getting things right.

Unfortunately it keeps crashing when I try to rebuild the kernel. Crashing with random spontaneous reboots, random segfaults from gcc and make, and random spurious characters appearing in source code. Overheating is the consensus of some sysadmin friends, or possibly bad memory.

Finally today, after perhaps 30 attempts, I managed to build the latest stable dist, through use of the gross but ingenious hack of moving /usr/bin/cc to realcc, then creating a new cc:

#!/bin/sh

realcc
sleep 2

... thereby letting the cpu cool down after every compile. Ugh ugh ugh.

(I also now have the geek joy of getting my little home FreeBSD natd, named and apache running router down to a measly 18 processes under top. Less than 7MB of memory used on reboot :-) )