Diagnosing FreeBSD Ethernet Link Flapping at the Driver Level
How to tell whether a flapping network interface is a cabling/physical-layer problem, a switch-side issue, or a driver/firmware problem, using FreeBSD's own interface statistics.
You have a specific problem. Here's how to diagnose and resolve it.
How to tell whether a flapping network interface is a cabling/physical-layer problem, a switch-side issue, or a driver/firmware problem, using FreeBSD's own interface statistics.
FreeBSD panicked and rebooted. Here's how to get the crash dump kgdb actually needs, and how to read it well enough to find the responsible driver or subsystem.
Why ntpd sometimes refuses to correct large clock offsets, how to read its own diagnostic output correctly, and when stepping the clock manually is the right call instead of waiting.
New connections start silently failing on a busy firewall, and pfctl reports the state table is full. Here's how to confirm it and size the table correctly for real traffic levels.
How to find which rc.d script is actually holding up boot, distinguish a genuinely slow service from an unnecessary dependency chain, and fix each case differently.
ZFS looks like it's eating every gigabyte of memory on the system. This is the Adaptive Replacement Cache working as designed — here's how to confirm that and tune it if it's genuinely a problem.
What a Solaris-assert-style ZFS panic actually means, why it almost always points to genuine pool corruption rather than a kernel bug, and how to safely get the system back up.
An application crashes on Haiku and a debug report window appears. Rather than dismissing it, here's how to actually read what it's telling you and use it to fix — or usefully report — the crash.
No sound at all, from any application, usually traces to the Media Server or a driver-detection problem — here's how to distinguish the two and work through each.
Haiku won't boot normally, or hangs partway through. Here's how to use the boot loader's safe mode options to isolate which specific subsystem is actually at fault.