Saving the crash to tape for shipment or archives

When archiving a set of crash dumps to tape, you may wish to first compress the ( vm ) unix. X and vmcore. X files, again, to use less media space. This also makes life a bit easier for the person who will later read the tape onto his own system to analyze the files, initially allowing him to use less disk space until he is ready to uncompress the files and start the analysis work.

When compressing the files, please use the standard UNIX compress command instead of your favorite public domain or third-party compression utilities. Don't assume that the person to whom you are sending the tapes uses nonstandard programs.

After writing the files to tape, write-protect the tape and, only then, verify that you can read the tape successfully. Too many potentially valuable system crash files have been lost due to faulty tapes!

Finally, label the tape!

Once the savecore files are safely archived, you can remove them from the disk. In general, it is a good idea to maintain the bounds file, which contains the next sequence number to use. Not only does it help provide a history of how many crashes have been captured, but it helps prevent you from ending up with a dozen vmcore.0 files on tapes over time. It also, again, makes life just a bit easier for the person you send your crashes to for analysis. He won't have to keep shuffling things around to avoid overwriting the previous crash that had the same sequence number and thus the same file names .

If you plan to send the tape to another person for analysis, it is best to provide the following information:

• System activity as best known at the time of the crash.

• A brief description of the crash history for this system from the system administrator's point of view.

• The system configuration and tuning files. From a Solaris 1 system, provide the kernel configuration file and the param.c file. From Solaris 2 systems, provide the /etc/system file.

• List of software modifications and patches installed, showrev -p output if Solaris 2.

• General system and network information, including:

  • Hardware configuration. From a Solaris 1 system, devinfo -vp output is helpful. From a Solaris 2 system, provide prtconf -vp output.

  • List of third-party drivers and applications.

  • Network-based server and client relationships.

• The /var/adm/messages* files.

The more information you can provide to the person who will analyze the crash files, the better idea he will have of where to start his search for the cause of the problem.