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General troubleshooting advice for FreeBSD
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2025-04-20-19-08-gg2.5pro-experimental.md

Seeking the best unofficial resources

I fed a forty-word paragraph to Google Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) on the evening of Sunday 20th April. Twenty of the forty:

Where can I find general troubleshooting advice for FreeBSD? Emphasis on: general. … I'm looking for the best unofficial resources. Thanks.

Gemini offered a 508-word response. I:

  1. reduced it to around 330 (not counting * or … as words)
  2. added a link to the third edition (2018) of Absolute FreeBSD
  3. add a direct link to the FreeBSD tips page
  4. added a link to the freebsd-questions mailing list
  5. added GitHub links for the two UPDATING files – note that your local copies may be different.

Gemini's response (condensed)

… the official FreeBSD Handbook and FAQ are excellent resources, … the FreeBSD community is very active, …

… some of the best unofficial resources for general FreeBSD troubleshooting:

  1. The FreeBSD Forums

    • …
    • …
    • … troubleshooting tag …
    • … provide details like error messages, logs, hardware configuration, and what steps you've already tried.

  2. r/freebsd

    • …
    • …
    • … Users often recommend books like Absolute FreeBSD for deeper understanding, which inherently aids troubleshooting.

  3. Blogs and personal websites

    • …
    • … technical articles, including guides on network performance troubleshooting and comparing FreeBSD/Linux troubleshooting tools (top, gcore, procstat, etc.)
    • FreeBSD tips ….

  4. Mailing lists

General troubleshooting approaches gathered from these resources

Check the logs:

  • always start by examining system logs like /var/log/messages and relevant application logs
  • tools like dmesg are also essential after boot or hardware changes.

Verbose booting:

  • if you have boot issues, try booting in verbose mode to see detailed kernel messages.

Isolate the problem:

  • try to determine if the issue is related to hardware, a specific software package, network configuration, a recent update, or system configuration.

Hardware checks:

  • ensure your hardware is supported and configured correctly (check BIOS/UEFI settings, IRQs, etc.)
  • sometimes, simple things like replacing an IDE cable can fix disk errors.

Use system utilities:

  • become familiar with standard FreeBSD tools like top (to check CPU, memory, I/O usage), ps, sockstat, netstat, vmstat, iostat, sysctl, ping, and traceroute.

Read UPDATING:

Simplify:

  • if possible, temporarily remove hardware or disable services to see if the problem persists, helping narrow down the cause.

Baseline performance:

  • for performance issues, try to establish what "normal" performance looks like for your system before trying to diagnose deviations.

By combining searching the forums and Reddit, reading relevant blog posts, and applying standard troubleshooting techniques, you should be able to tackle most general FreeBSD problems.

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From Google's closing sentence:

standard troubleshooting techniques

So:

  • which standard set is best for users of FreeBSD?

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grahamperrin commented Apr 21, 2025 •
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The Gemini-recommended FreeBSD tips page was, initially, a great surprise. (I have an archive of more than forty-five thousand bookmarks, gathered over two decades, no record of the page.)

The archive does include four other pages in the same domain, one of which is now in my public library:

On closer inspection: whilst https://srobb.net/freebsd.html does include tips that endure, and the page was apparently updated a few minutes ago (2025-04-21 05:12:35), at least five things prove that it has not received meaningful attention from a human for a very long time:

  • a few mentions of Adobe's Flash plugin for web browsers
  • FreeBSD-CURRENT is wrongly described as "now 7.0-CURRENT"
  • cvsup
  • "a very new machine, with a 3 gig processor and a gig of RAM, …"
  • the suggestion to run kldload reiserfs.

Reality:

– and so on. Bottom line:

  • the "last modified" part of the robb.net website footer is misleading, I should ignore it.

(I did already know, from detection by Zotero, that the page is dated 2015-02-22.)

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troubleshooting tag

  • eleven posts over a period of maybe seven or ten years
  • one of the eleven is solved.

Related:

Discussion of the 2018 upgrade, after the event:

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