6.8 Crashes

6.8.1 Panics and their causes

Some causes of system panics are:

Memory errors
Bugs in the Operating System
Disk write errors - bad blocks on disk

The system logger, syslogd, writes a log of system error messages in /var/adm/messages or /var/log/syslog. These can be helpful in tracking down the cause of a system problem or kernel panic.

For more information during recurrent crashes turn on savecore in /etc/rc.local (SunOS 4.X) or /etc/rc2.d/S20sysetup (SunOS 5.X). When enabled the system will save a core image of memory in the file /var/crash/'uname -n'/vmcore.# and the kernel's namelist in the same directory in the file vmunix.# (SunOS 4.X) or unix.# (SunOS 5.X) during the reboot. These files can then be analyzed for the causes of the system panic. The appropriate lines in rc.local are:

# Default is to not do a savecore

# mkdir -p /var/crash/`hostname`

# echo -n 'checking for crash dump... '

# intr savecore /var/crash/`hostname`

Unix System Administration - 8 AUG 1996

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