From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jul 7 15:54:23 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id PAA14133 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 15:54:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail1.sirius.com (mail1.sirius.com [205.134.253.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA14126 for ; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 15:54:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ds9.sirius.com (ds9.sirius.com [205.134.226.34]) by mail1.sirius.com (8.8.6/Sirius-8.8.6-97.06.26) with ESMTP id PAA14716 for ; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 15:54:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (dlowe@localhost) by ds9.sirius.com (8.6.12/961127) with SMTP id PAA13976 for ; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 15:54:24 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: ds9.sirius.com: dlowe owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 15:54:23 -0700 (PDT) From: David Lowe X-Sender: dlowe@ds9 Reply-To: David Lowe To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Logging kernel panics Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk People - I'm trying to find a nice way of discovering the causes of kernel panics, post-mortem. Details: A news server, which is running beautifully except that twice now it has rebooted without any hints in the logfiles. We'd really like to figure out what is going on - but we don't want to have to go down to the remote site where the server lives, to look at the console in order to figure out the cause of the crashes (while the server remains out of service...) Is there some fairly reliable way of storing panic messages, short of logging all console output via a serial port? We already have a serial console, but the darned thing doesn't have any logging at all. A quick glance through the -questions archives shows me that setting savecore_enable="YES" in rc.conf might do the trick. Anything I should know about this option? If I set this to yes, how might I find out the cause of a panic from the dump? Any other/better ideas? I assume this will not work if the root filesystem is fubared... but it would be better than nothing. Muchas gracias, David Lowe