5.4-RC2: Unexpected reboots

[Mike Tancsa]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:39:16 +0200, in sentex.lists.freebsd.questions
you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have had problems recently keeping my 5.3 up, then I upgraded to 
>5.4-RC2. Things seemed stable, but then I just ran last:
>
>I didn't realise the crashes while locked in with ssh, I thought it was 
>
>Any ideas what causes this? Any ideas how I can tune syslog to grap the 
>events?


If its a software bug thats causing the machine to crash, enable
dumpon so that you have at least a core dump that will tell you where
the panic is.
e.g. if your swap is ad0s1b
dumpon -v /dev/ad0s1b

Build a kernel with debug symbols (dont worry, this wont get
installed, it will just be there for postmortems) by adding 

makeoptions     DEBUG=-g                #Build kernel with symbols

to your kernel and recompile
then add

dumpdev="/dev/ad0s1b"           # Device name to crashdump to (or NO).
dumpdir="/var/crash"            # Directory where crash dumps are to
be stored

to /etc/rc.conf

The next time you get a reboot if its due to a kernel bug, it will
save the dump file in /var/crash

For more info, see
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug.html#KERNELDEBUG-OBTAIN


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Mike Tancsa, Sentex communications http://www.sentex.net
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mike at sentex.net, (http://www.tancsa.com)