Hallo Chris,

Chris Buechler schrieb am 24. December 2004:

>>microuptime went backwards (461641.016466) -> (460945.635767)

I cannot even be sure, that this message has anything to do with the
freeze. I normally do not check the serial console, but when the
Soekris (or m0n0wall) completely froze, the web-interface did not
respond and I wanted to reset it with the serial console. That's when
I noticed the message.

I also googled and found out, that it's usually a harmless hiccup and
supposedly fixed.

>That's interesting.  I've never seen that message on Soekris hardware
>before, and you're the first to see it on m0n0wall

I have four different IP-addresses entered in the NTP field, but I
guess that's not the reason for the message, because (if I understand
it correctly) FreeBSD 4.10 would gradually adjust the time, if it got
a huge difference from a flaky NTP server.

>When I've seen it on FreeBSD

Unfortunately (?) I have no FreeBSD machine, but an OpenBSD one. So no
experience with FreeBSD whatsoever.

>or it's just flaky hardware that ends up failing vendor diagnostic
>checks.

The Soekris 4801 ran fine for several months until now. It's even
standing freely (meaning good air-circulation) and never gets more
than hand-warm. And it's been running fine since today at noon.

>If you only see it once, I'd write it off as normal enough not to be
>concerned about it.

Well, put yourself in my shoes: no FreeBSD experience, first freeze,
then a look at the serial console, an "unusual" message. Naturally I
assumed that this would have something to do with the freeze.

I used to reboot the Soekris when I rebooted my windows-machine (about
once every 2 days just in case), but I skipped that, assuming the
Soekris with m0n0wall would be able to run for months of uptime. So I
never encountered any freeze, that might be uptime related.

>If you get floods of that message

No, the message was there only once. Never seen it before. I also
reboot the Soekris via the serial console to see the boot-messages,
never saw that message in my life.

>This wasn't much help, but at least you know that console message
>almost certainly didn't have anything to do with it.

Thank you for that.

Kind regards   Frederick