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From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de>
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Subject: Re: Making kernel panics more noticable
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.961111215645.12392A-100000@capella.grayphics.com> from Nick Esborn at "Nov 11, 96 09:58:27 pm"
To: nick@grayphics.com (Nick Esborn)
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 12:13:39 +0100 (MET)
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Questions)
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Nick Esborn writes:
> On Mon, 11 Nov 1996, Doug White wrote:
>
>> The system should auto-restart unless the system really died.  In any case
>> I believe the pertinent info is logged before the system is rebooted.  I
>> could be wrong.
>
> It does reboot, and while that certainly does help keep the system
> running, it makes it very difficult to isolate the causes of these
> problems.  I find no evidence of the cause of the problem.
> /var/log/messages just has logins and all of a sudden the boot-up info.
> No reason for the reboot is logged. :(

That's a configuration problem.  Create a directory /var/crash and
modify your /etc/sysconfig:

   # Set to the name of the device for kernel crashdumps, or `off' to
   # disable any statically configured dumpdev, or NO for no change.
   # The device should normally be one of the swap devices specified
   # in /etc/fstab.
   dumpdev=/dev/wd0s1b

   # Set to YES if you want kernel crashdumps to be saved for debugging
   savecore=YES

After this, and after rebooting, any panic will be saved in
/var/crash.  Check out the online handbook for first steps in dump
analysis.  You'll also get a console message telling you the cause of
the dump, though this won't be logged.

For further details, see "The Complete FreeBSD", page 83.

Greg