Re: server crashing

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Al Zick <al%familysafeinternet.com@localhost> 
wrote:
> The server is in data center and I am not there. I don't have any
> details of what happened. It didn't seem to log anything. There is no
> errors. I just know that it is down, when my alarm goes off. If I am
> not trying to back up with rsync then I don't have an issue. How
> would I get the information that you are looking for?

A panic usually won't leave much evidence of what happened, other than
the crash dump in /var/crash if it is in there. Sometimes you can
infer what happened from the /var/log/messages file, but not often.
The dump file is the definitive source of info.

If your server is configured properly (or maybe "correctly"?), when it
panics it will copy the dump file to /var/crash after an automatic
reboot. This can then be used to figure out what happened, hopefully.
I need to research how to make sure it's configured properly to do
this, but I think you need as much swap as your memory size. I've got
other things to do right now unfortunately. I hope someone else can
answer if they know.

I'm not aware of any crashes related to rsync off hand. You'd have to
search the pr (problem report) database to see if you can find
something related. It's probably network or I/O related if it isn't
hardware.

Andy