Auditing the FAQ

Can't edit the wiki?

If you can't edit the wiki email Eitan Adler <eadler AT freebsd DOT org> with your account name and what issues you found (or what questions are good).

What do we care about?

New questions can go to NewFAQs

Want to help with the patches?

  1. Install the required tools

  2. Clone the documentation repository

  3. edit documentation/content/en/books/faq/_index.adoc
  4. Test as explained in item 4

  5. Create a patch per step 5 and either email it to to <doc AT freebsd DOT org> or (better if you have an account) submit it in Bugzilla per step 6

It isn't hard - its just [https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/fdp-primer/asciidoctor-primer/ ASCII text with some markup].

The Big Giant Table

/!\ To do: convert URLs and remove CategoryStale when done.

Question link

Who Reviewed?

Comments or concerns

what-is-FreeBSD

ChrisRees

Historical information.

FreeBSD-goals

Eitan Adler

discussed on doc@

bsd-license-restrictions

Derek Wood

docs/173746 r40116

replace-current-OS

Eitan Adler

fine

why-called-FreeBSD

Eitan Adler

fine

differences-to-other-bsds

Eitan Adler

fine

latest-version

ChrisRees

Dynamic information requires too much updating... better to link to releng page or similar after a brief description of stable/ and head/. Update for Subversion too.

current

gjb

fine

stable

Derek Wood

Second paragraph uses static references to old versions and should be rewritten. docs/173745 r40114

release-freq

Eitan Adler

fine

responsible

Eitan Adler

fine

where-get

mjg

needs review about snapshots; incorrect link to FreeBSD 7.4; would use a link to a table with security support periods

access-pr

Eitan Adler

fine

books

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

doc-formats

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

mailing

Eitan Adler

fine

irc

Derek Wood

Should be updated with IRC/Channels (or possibly linked to. remove efnet #freebsd entry

forums

mjg

fine

training

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

which-architecture

Eitan Adler

fine

floppy-download

nyan

fine

floppy-image-too-large

Joe Barbish

remove obsolete- floppy images nolonger provided, motherboard mfg unsupported

install-instructions-location

Eitan Adler

needs direct link to 8.x and 9.x instructions docs/174130 r40294

need-to-run

dteske, Eitan Adler, Mark Saad

needs to talk about non-GENERIC (see the thread on hackers). In the section for "need-to-run" there should be a mention about setting kern.cam.ctl.disable=1 in /boot/loader.conf , for systems with less then 256M of ram . Also I wonder if there are more low memory tunings that need an mention here.

custom-boot-floppy

Eitan Adler

article linked is wrong

windows-coexist

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

win95-damaged-boot-manager

scottl

mildly out of data and relevance due to it's references to floppies, ide, and windows. At one time, we could have done s/sysinstall/sade/ but that is no longer the only change that would need to be made considering recent SVN r244859 where sade is now bsdinstall (read: the keystroke instructions are all wrong now). We have time tho (time before MFC, time before Releng, etc. etc.). 9.1 still has sade based on sysinstall, so the quick-fix of s/sysinstall/sade/ will fix this portion of the documentation (for now, until SVN r244859 makes it into a releng release).

boot-floppy-strangeness

Eitan Adler, Joe Barbish

remove obsolete- floppy images nolonger provided, motherboard mfg unsupported r40353

no-install-cdrom

Marc UBM

should be rephrased

need-complete-sources

scottl

fine

need-kernel

scottl

fine

password-encryption

Eitan Adler, scottl

fine

memory-limits

scottl, nyan

out of date. by 10 years, pc98 can use up to 512MB memory only by hardware (chipset) limitation.

ffs-limits

scottl, Eitan Adler

relevant but very out of date; do those bugs still exist?

archsw-readin-failed-error

Lowell Gilbert

check present, error changed (docs/177036)

general-configuration-tool

Eitan Adler, scottl

fine

which-hardware-to-get

Joe Barbish

fine

memory-upper-limitation

Bas Smeelen

fine

memory-i386-over-4gb

Bas Smeelen

fine

architectures

Derek Wood

Should link to http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ and explain tier 1/2/3 status. r40095

supported-hard-drives

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

Requires complete rewrite

supported-scsi-controllers

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

SATA devices? DVD RW? Blue-Ray RW? burncd is not used any more .

tape-support

imp

&os; supports all standard SCSI tape interfaces.

tape-changer-support

dwhite

the second paragraph seems to point out a complication somewhat unnecessarily, but the devices noted are the correct devices and tools

supported-cdrom-drives

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

SATA devices? DVD RW? Blue-Ray RW? burncd is not used any more.

supported-cdrw-drives

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

SATA devices? DVD RW? Blue-Ray RW? burncd is not used any more.

moused

Joe Barbish

fine

text-mode-cut-paste

Joe Barbish

Its not cut-paste but copy-paste docs/174134

mouse-wheel-buttons

Joe Barbish

fine

keyboard-delete-key

imp

fine

support-broadcom

Joe Barbish

fine

multiport-serial-support

imp

the device lines are bogus and need to be converted to hints.

serial-console-prompt

Joe BArbish

fine

es1370-silent-pcm

Jacub Lach

That's one thing, but most often silent device is caused by need for proper device.hints, as usual with e.g. snd_hda. This could use mention of it.

power-management-support

Jakub Lach

description is lacking, apm is obsolete r40305, no mention of ahci. see TuningPowerConsumption

pae

Bas Smeelen

fine

signal11

Bas Smeelen

fine

trap-12-panic

Bas Smeelen

fine

proc-table-full

alfred

The new message printed is:"maxproc limit exceeded by uid %i, please see tuning(7) and login.conf(5)" The faq is wrong, and tells the user to change sysctl.conf, where it should say to update loader.conf. r40668

mail-loopback

Bas Smeelen

fine

remote-fullscreen

imp

fine

connection-delay

Bas Smeelen

fine

file-table-full

Bas Smeelen

fine

computer-clock-skew

imp

likely is way obsolete., also, use ntpd

indefinite-wait-buffer

Bas Smeelen, imp

fine, grep for it in the kernel tree since the swapper has been rewritten a bunch.

lock-order-reversal

Eitan Adler

fine

called-with-non-sleepable-locks-held

trasz

could add reference to locking(9). r40226

touch-not-found

Eitan Adler

fine

officesuite

Jakub Lach

chanage OO to apache open office r40295

user-apps

Derek Wood

Needs to be updated for pkgng.

how-do-download-ports-tree

Eitan Adler

fine

java

Jacub Lach

fine

ports-4x

MiroslavLachman

fine

make-index

MiroslavLachman

fine

ports-update

MiroslavLachman

fine

ports-major-upgrade

MiroslavLachman

fine

ports-minor-upgrade

MiroslavLachman

fine

minimal-sh

Derek Wood

docs/174029

midi-sound-files

Jacub Lach

I'm not usually creating wavs from midi (honestly, probably nobody is doing that for music listening any more, maybe it should be swapped to "how to rip CD to mp3 or ogg" with links to port tools, but maybe this is already old fashioned ;) ) but I have audio/timidity++ installed, and just checked, it still works as described.

convert-back-from-pkgng

Jakub Lach

fine

make-kernel

Jakub Lach

fine

why-kernel-big

Miroslav Lachman, Jakub Lach

GENERIC is 11M, 12M, 14M 8.2/8.3/9.0 Nowadays kernels are compiled in /debug mode by default/. Kernels built in debug mode contain many symbols that are used for debugging, thus greatly increasing the size of the kernel. Note that there will be little or no performance decrease from running a debug kernel, and it is useful in case of a system panic. docs/174244

generic-kernel-build-failure

Bas Smeelen

fine

scheduler-in-use

Derek Wood

fine

scheduler-kern-quantum

Derek Wood

Current scheduler is ULE, this shouldn't be a faq item. it isn't incorrect and some have found issues with ULE so leave this for now. It should be revisited in the future

adding-disks

Bas Smeelen

fine

new-huge-disk

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

Requires some rewrite with respect do bsdinstall , because sysinstall is not used any more in new distributions. s/sysinstall(8), or fdisk(8) and disklabel(8)/bsdinstall(8), or gpart(8) and [optionally] geom(8). The note about boot0cfg should stand (we still use it heavily on all systems we deploy).

dangerously-dedicated

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk, dteske

Requires some rewrite with respect do bsdinstall , because sysinstall is not used any more in new distributions. We can switch out fdisk for gpart but we'll also have to note that the dangerous dedication is only when applying legacy partition (MBR style) opposed to GPT. But I suspect this isn't about fdisk, but instead sysinstall (so ignore that as fdisk is still very much alive). The "dangerously dedicated" section is completely obsolete. The section can probably just be deleted. An alternative would be something that talks about the relative merits of MBR, BSD (formerly "dangerously dedicated"), and GPT partitioning -- MBR vs. GPT being the really important bit.

safe-softupdates

stable@

reviewed on -stable and comments taken into account

mount-foreign-fs

name-goes-here

(!)

mount-dos

cpet

fine

crypto-file-system

Robert Watson

fine

nt-bootloader

dteske

As far as I know bsdinstall doesn't offer this functionality (yet). We could switch the documentation over to talking about boot0cfg.

lilo-bootloader

name-goes-here

(!)

grub-loader

nox

example is for grub legacy, maybe grub2 should be mentioned too and possibly also how to have grub2 boot directly w/o loader

booteasy-loader

name-goes-here

(!)

changing-bootprompt

Joe Barbish

fine

removable-drives

Andrea Venturoli

Would it be worth mentioning no /dev/xxxs1 is created when the device is plugged in after boot?

mount-cd-superblock

Joe Barbish

fine

cdrom-not-configured

Joe Barbish

fine

cdrom-unicode-filenames

Joe Barbish

fine

burncd-isofs

Joe Barbish

fine

copy-cd

Joe Barbish

fine

mount-audio-CD

Joe Barbish

fine

multi-session-CD

Marc UBM

fine

user-floppymount

mjg

despite linkname it is about USB etc.; contains some typos, should mentions labels

du-vs-df

MiroslavLachman

original Q & A are OK, but can be extended about zfs list space usage (with compression, dedup, snapshots etc.)

add-swap-space

MiroslavLachman

fine

manufacturer-disk-size

MiroslavLachman

fine

disk-more-than-full

MiroslavLachman

fine

startup-config-files

Joe BArbish

fine

adding-users

Joe Barbish

fine

root-not-found-cron-errors

Joe Barbish

fine

su-wheel-group

cpet

fine

rcconf-readonly

crees

fine

printer-setup

Joe Barbish

fine

keyboard-mappings

Joe Barbish

fine

user-quotas

Joe Barbish

fine

sysv-ipc

scottl,Bas Smeelen

fine

sendmail-alternative

Joe Barbish. Eitan Adler

fine

forgot-root-pw

dteske

bsdinstall does offer the ability to launch a shell, so we could switch this over to talking about running the commands on a shell obtained via bsdinstall.

CAD-reboot

Derek Wood

pcvt(4) hasn't been around since 6.X according to man pages. r40318

dos-to-unix-txt

cpet

fine

kill-by-name

Derek Wood

fine

reread-rc

Eitan Adler

fine

release-candidate

Jakub Lach

fine

kernel-chflag-failure

Joe barbish

fine

kernel-securelevel-time

Joe Barbish

fine

statd-mem-leak

Lowell Gilbert

fine, but no one may care

unsetting-schg

Joe Barbish

fine

ssh-shosts

Bas Smeelen

fine

vnlru

Bas Smeelen

fine

top-memory-states

Bas Smeelen

fine

free-memory-amount

Bas Smeelen

fine

var-empty

EitanAdler

fine

whatis-X

Joe Barbish

Answer shows outdated release number.

running-X

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

Answer uses pkg_add which is being replaced by pkgng in rel 10.0. r40603

running-X-securelevels

Lowell Gilbert

The running-X-securelevels question doesn't match what I actually see when I try it - diff proposed on -doc (jan)

x-and-moused

Marc UBM

fine

x-and-wheel

Marc UBM

fine

no-remote-x11

nox

fine

virtual-console

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

Application with KMS effects ?

vty-from-x

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

Application with KMS effects ?

xdm-boot

name-goes-here

(!)

xconsole-failure

Jakub Lach

Indeed xconsole throws such error, but not xterm -C. After _following_ recommendations (0600) in #xconsole-failure, there is xterm error as well as xconsole one still.

ps2-x

Eitan Adler, scottl, gavin

still references UserConfig) r41175

mouse-button-reverse

name-goes-here

install-splash

Joe Barbish

fine

windows-keys

Eitan Adler

still works but might want to mention you can use windows keys as compose etc too in xorg.conf

x-3d-acceleration

Jacub Lach

This should/could be updated a bit, especially that there is no mention of intel and newer cards, and those old ones (matrox etc.) are going to be dropped with newer xorg (kib@?)

diskless-booting

Joe BArbish

fine

router

Joe Barbish

fine

win95-connection

John Nielsen <lists AT jnielsen DOTnet>

This is a bit dated but fine. The natd Handbook page could maybe reference other ways of doing NAT besides natd--e.g. using pf or ipfw. The IPFW Handbook page could be updated and simplified to include e.g. "firewall_nat_enable" instead of using divert/natd.

slip-ppp-support

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

--(Most of the answer is obsolete. slip & dppp support was removed at 8.0 r40321

natd

Joe Barbish

fine

ethernet-aliases

MiroslavLachman

Use more usual dotted decimal netmask (255.255.255.0) instead of hexadecimal; also linked Handbook page (or FAQ it-self) should contains all possible syntax variants with CIDR, address ranges in rc.conf and IPv6 examples

nfs-linux

John Nielsen

fine. Possibly less of an issue than it used to be but I do remember encountering that issue.

exports-errors

Lowell Gilbert

It's fine. These questions haven't come up much lately, so it's also safe to delete the question.

ip-multicast

Eitan Adler

has to be rewritten to conform with reality

fqdn-hosts

Miroslav Lachman

fine

network-permission-denied

Joe Barbish

fine

ipfw-fwd

Joe Barbish

fine

service-redirect

Bas Smeelen

fine

bandwidth-mgr-tool

Joe Barbish

fine

bpf-not-configured

John Nielsen

fine

mount-smb-share

MiroslavLachman

fine

icmp-response-bw-limit

John Nielsen

fine

unknown-hw-addr-format

name-goes-here

(!)

arp-wrong-iface

MiroslavLachman

fine

sandbox

Eitan Adler

should discuss jails and capsicum; description of sandbox is misleading; needs to be more of a an answer - perhaps change to "what sandboxes does &os; offer?

securelevel

Joe Barbish

fine

extra-named-port

MiroslavLachman

fine

sendmail-port-587

MiroslavLachman

Q & A are fine, but I don't see sendmail listening on port 587 by default

toor-account

cpet

fine

userppp

Daniel O'Connor

fine

ppp-hangs

Daniel O'Connor

fine

ppp-nodial-auto

name-goes-here

(!)

no-route-to-host

Daniel O'Connor

fine

connection-threeminutedrop

Daniel O'Connor

fine

ppp-drop-heavy-load

Daniel O'Connor

It is now disabled by default. LQR can be enabled with the following line: enable lqr r40403

ppp-drop-random

name-goes-here

(!)

ppp-hangs-random

name-goes-here

(!)

ppp-remote-not-responding

Daniel O'Connor

Is Brian Somers still a FreeBSD committer? r40299

ppp-hung

Daniel O'Connor

Is Brian Somers still a FreeBSD committer? r40299

ppp-same-magic

Daniel O'Connor

fine

ppp-lcp-constant

Daniel O'Connor

fine

ppp-shell-test-lockup

Eitan Adler

fine

ppp-null-modem

Daniel O'Connor

fine

ppp-auto-noreasondial

Daniel O'Connor

fine

ccp-errors

Lowell Gilbert

This should be very unusual now, but it's still completely correct.

ppp-connectionspeed

name-goes-here

(!)

ppp-ignores-backslash

name-goes-here

(!)

ppp-segfault-nocore

Daniel O'Connor

says it doesn't dump core because its root; false - its because its setuid r40303

ppp-autodialprocess-noconnect

name-goes-here

(!)

ppp-nat-games

Daniel O'Connor

basically be replaced with "use 'nat same_ports yes'", or suggest the user use PF for NAT and run the miniupnpd port. Certainly these days games (and every other network app) are much more NAT savvy due to its prevalence.

fcs-errors

name-goes-here

(!)

desperation

Eitan Adler

remove reference to newsgroup, because we have no real presence there anymore

found-serial

Andrea Venturoli, Eitan Adler

Shouldn't USB to serial converters be mentioned? Also discuss uart? r40325

access-serial-ports

name-goes-here

discuss uart

enable-multiport-serial

Eitan Adler

needs to be updated for uart

default-serial-params

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

enable-dialup

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

dumb-terminal

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

cannot-tip

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

more-swap

Joe Barbish, Bas Smeelen

fine - but does Linux still use less swap? In the answer: FreeBSD only appears to use more swap than Linux. Should be fine. On a 2GB RAM i386 laptop with rootzfs, xfce, thunderbird, firefox, and multiple terminals opened no swap is used and still 1.2GB RAM is free

top-freemem

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

chmod-symlinks

Eitan Adler

fine

dos-binaries

cpet

fine

translation

Eitan Adler

fine

freebsd-mail-bounces

dhw

needs massive changes - postmaster@ to provide

free-account

cpet

fine but small list should be added.

daemon-name

Eitan Adler

fine

use-beastie

Jakub Lach, Eitan Adler

fine

daemon-images

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

glossary

Joe Barbish

fine

bikeshed-painting

Eitan Adler

very-very-cool

Eitan Adler

letmeoutofhere

Eitan Adler

changing-lightbulbs

Eitan Adler

dev-null

Eitan Adler

learn-advanced

Eitan Adler

fine

how-to-contribute

cpet

fine

define-snap-release

Eitan Adler

defines releases, but not snapshots

ctm

cpet, Eitan Adler

fine

submitting-kernel-extensions

Joe Barbish, Eitan Adler

fine

kernel-panic-troubleshooting

mjg

no mention of textdumps, addr2line; should show some panic from amd64; should show how to test if dumps work

change-kernel-address-space

Bas Smeelen

fine


CategoryStale

ThwackAFAQ (last edited 2022-01-08T07:02:59+0000 by PauAmma)