by I've been setting up this particular FreeBSD 3.4-release to be the
file server for my little home network. Of the last month or so of
setting this sucker up, I only encountered handful of core dumps
(probably less than 5).
Over this weekend, I began to transfer all the files from MS-DOS (in
ZIPed form) to UFS. And while trying to mount that MS-DOS partition to
access the ZIP files, I came over that little interesting note
contained in mount_msdos -- saying in FreeBSD 2.x (or somethin')
earlier, mounting DOS partitions w/greater than 16KB cluster size will
corrupt other mounted file system under FreeBSD.
Funny as it may seem, I *could not* get 32KB-clustered, 2GB DOS
partition to mount. I had to re-partition to exactly 1GB (16KB cluster
size) and have that mount.
Anyway, after mounting the said partition in read-only state, I began
to notice awful lot of core dumps by FreeBSD. Over this two days, I
encounetered no less than 20, with at least one unannounced
spontaneous reboot (I wasn't there, so I didn't see what exactly
happened).
Now having all the file transfers done and no more having to mount
that DOS partition, I noticed there's still a good amount of core
dumps going on. The login prompt seemed to be the most suseptable -- I
enter the user ID at login, press [ENTER] and there's good chance of
voila -- a core dump. The record is 7 dumps straight while trying to
log on. It also looks like other programs running aren't immune
either, although I haven't seen any daemons dumping craps.
Did mounting and accessing MS-DOS partition permanently damaged this
copy of FreeBSD? The messages during boot-up didn't hint at any
anomalies...