Chapter 5. Crashing Your Own System

We've talked about what a system crash is. We've discussed how to use the UNIX savecore program to capture an image of memory when the system crashes. Shortly, we will discuss how to analyze the system crash dump savecore files.

At this point, it is only fair to show you a fun and educational way to quickly crash your own system on purpose. If you have savecore set up properly, you'll have a set of files to experiment with during the following chapters.

Needless to say, crashing a system is not something you should do lightly. If your system happens to be a big database server or is being used by half of your department, forcing an unannounced crash will not make you very popular. Even if you are the only user on the system, you would be wise to save your mail, close any edit sessions, and exit as many tools as you can before proceeding. It would also be prudent to unmount any NFS file systems your system is using. Finally, just before you crash the system, run a few sync commands to make sure any lingering local disk data still in memory is flushed out to the disks.

Back up your system! If you cannot afford to lose even a single bit of data from your system disks, back up all of them before proceeding any further . Any crash, whether forced or not, can result in data loss.