GSoC Project: Automated Kernel Crash Reporting System - Discussion

[tzabal at it.teithe.gr]

Quoting Ilya Bakulin <webmaster at kibab.com>:

> On 15.05.12 23:30, tzabal at it.teithe.gr wrote:
>> Hello Community,
>>
>> I have the project "Automated Kernel Crash Reporting System" for this
>> GSoC and I would like to discuss my plans about it before starting the
>> coding on May 21.
>
>> * Can you recommend a secure way of sending a report from a FreeBSD
>> system to the Central Collector machine?
>>
> You can use scp(1) and ship a SSH public key with your software. The
> target server must be configured to disable PTY allocation for this key,
> so only SCP/SFTP transfer will be possible.

Good, this is a scenario that I was looking for.

>> * Which data do you want kcrashreporter to collect? At the moment I
>> have considered the panic message, the backtrace, the version level of
>> the release, the hardware platform (uname -vm) and the configuration
>> file of the panicked kernel (config -x `sysctl -n kern.bootfile`).
> Collecting the list of loaded modules (kldstat) is also nessesary :-)

You are right. Added to the list.

>> * Do you propose a different Web Server than the Apache HTTP Server?
>> For example, on my initial planning I had included MySQL as the
>> selected DBMS and after some discussions I changed to PostgreSQL.
> As far as I remember, you're going to use PHP as a programming language?

Yes, PHP along with SQL for the Server Side part.

> In this case Apache is a good choice. I would however recommend using
> www/nginx and PHP in FastCGI mode (FPM option in lang/php5 port). This
> is a preffered setup for almost all Russian highloaded websites.
> At the beginning using Apache is a reasonable choice.

I have never used nginx before. I have considered also the lighttpd.  
Both with BSD licenses (nginx with a 2-clause BSD like license) and  
FastCGI support. As I read from Wikipedia, PHP performance has  
received special attention in lighttpd. I will test both Web servers  
and then I will make up my mind.

----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.