Re: I think I just got a panic

[Mark Cullen <mark.cullen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :But I was running X at the time :( X froze and stayed there for about 10 
> :seconds or something, then the computer rebooted. Probably a panic?
> :
> :For whatever it's worth I was just doing a buildworld, X with a couple 
> :of xterms open (icewm) and I had a samba share mounted. I was ssh'd into 
> :another machine in one of the xterms and was about to vi /etc/gettytab 
> :locally when it locked up and rebooted.
> :
> :I've now set dumpdev in rc.conf. Is that enough to atleast save a dump, 
> :so I can tell for sure if it was a panic or not, incase it happens again?
> :-- 
>
>     It sounds like it auto-rebooted after a crash.  The 10 seconds was
>     probably the 'will reboot after 15 seconds' message on the console
>     which you didn't see because you were in X.  With your dumpdev set if

That's what I was thinking too.

>     you have another crash you should see the disk drive LED go solid for
>     a while, indicating that it is writing out the crash dump to disk. 
>     It may take a little longer before it reboots, depending on how much
>     memory you have (that it has to copy to the disk), so if the disk drive
>     LED is on be a patient and you should have a crash dump when you come
>     up again.

Cool. It's probably unlikely to do it again until the moment after I 
install it on my home server, just to annoy me :-)

>     Note that the system will attempt to store the crash dump in /var/crash.
>     If /var/crash does not have sufficient space, the system will not be 
>     able to save a crash dump.  What most people do is:
>
> 	cpdup /var/crash /usr/var.crash
> 	rm -rf /var/crash
> 	ln -s /usr/var.crash /var/crash
>
>     or
>
> 	cpdup /var/crash /home/var.crash
> 	rm -rf /var/crash
> 	ln -s /home/var.crash /var/crash

I saw dumpdir in defaults/rc.conf. Could this be used to achieve the 
same thing? It doesn't matter too much to me, as I usually just have a 
big / and possibly a seperate /usr/home, since it's just me messing 
about at home it's an easier route to take in my opinion!

>     So /var/crash has enough space.
>
>     That's actually something we should fix in the installer... to make sure
>     that /var has enough space to hold crash dumps (a nominal ~2-3x the space
>     would be good if it doesn't eat too much from other partitions.  i.e. if
>     the disk is big enough).

That's a good idea! On the subject of the installer, I encountered a bug 
when installing on my laptop. The whole disk partition thing was a bit 
weird to start with, so I ended up deleting all the partitions (swap, /, 
whatever else is in the list) and making new ones. Originally I thought 
to use * it would have to be used on the end partition (which is not the 
case!) so I had it laid out something like

[swap] [256]
[/]    [*]

It all installed fine, but when I got to the end of the install (I 
think) it started spewing out errors because / was s1b(?) and not s1a 
like it was expecting. I went through the install again after that (it 
wouldn't actually boot either) and did

[/]    [*]
[swap] [256]

and it worked alright. Don't know if you're aware of that one. My memory 
is kind of poor sometimes. I'll try and reproduce it, possibly tomorrow, 
and write down exact steps (and make a new post, or just continue on 
this thread?) if it's any help to anyone.

Thank you all, once again! You people rule :)

> 					-Matt
> 					Matthew Dillon 
> 					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>


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