All, I apologize for getting back so late. It's tough being a college student. ;-)
Thanks to Arturo and gentux for helping out so far. I've tried catting the output from dmesg and running it regularly with crontab, as was advised below. This, unfortunately doesn't work because cron can only run as often as once a minute. This means that if a crash happens in between these dmesg snapshots, the debugging information is lost. The only way that catting dmesg to a file will work is if the crash just so happens to occur right as dmesg is being logged. I might be able to increase my chances if there was anyway to set up vixie-cron to run more often than once a minute (once a second? more?) Also, it seems that the kernel's ring buffer in /var/log/dmesg gets cleared with every boot, so I can't check it after a crash. Is there some other place that old kernel logs get stored? Maybe I have a problem in my syslog-ng setup? I don't see anything out of the ordinary in /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf. One thing that I am going to try is instead of having messages sent to tty12, I'm logging them to a file. We'll see if this doesn't solve the problem. I've also added the "kernel debugging" option to my kernel, but have no idea how to get at this kernel debugging info. Can someone please point me to a good manpage? As to the log_buf_len=n option, how do I do this? Is this added at the kernel command line? Thanks again, all, for your timely help. As always, please be sure to CC me in your response. Kris Kerwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------ Original Email ----- Hey all, I've been experiencing some random kernel crashes, and need a way of finding out what happened. I can't find any information in /var/log/lastlog or in /var/log/messages.*.bz2. Is there any way that I can monitor kernel messages during a crash and recover this information on the next boot? Thanks in advance. Kris Kerwin PS: Please CC me in your response. --------------------- On Wednesday 07 September 2005 14:09, Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman wrote: > Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman wrote: > > You may snapshot dmesg's output in a timely manner, ala crontab. > > Additionally, you my wish to play with the log_buf_len kernel parameter: > > log_buf_len=n Sets the size of the printk ring buffer, in bytes. > Format is n, nk, nM. n must be a power of two. > The default is set in kernel config. > > > -- > Arturo "Buanzo" Busleiman - www.buanzo.com.ar > Consultor en Seguridad Informatica > KTP Consultores - info AT ktpconsultores.com.ar ----------------------- On Wednesday 07 September 2005 13:55, gentuxx wrote: > Kris Kerwin wrote: > >Hey all, > > > >I've been experiencing some random kernel crashes, and need a way of > > finding > > >out what happened. > > > >I can't find any information in /var/log/lastlog or > >in /var/log/messages.*.bz2. > > > >Is there any way that I can monitor kernel messages during a crash and > > recover > > >this information on the next boot? > > > >Thanks in advance. > > > >Kris Kerwin > > > >PS: Please CC me in your response. > > The /var/log/dmesg log contains more specific kernel messages. You > can also get the messages by running `dmesg` (basically `cat`'s that > file). If the kernel crashes, messages from previous boots should be > store there. Also, if you're running a custom kernel, you may want to > turn on the "kernel debugging" option on. (I haven't used that, but I > remember seeing the last time I compiled my kernel.) > > HTH. > > -- > gentux > echo "hfouvyAdpy/ofu" | perl -pe 's/(.)/chr(ord($1)-1)/ge' > > gentux's gpg fingerprint ==> 34CE 2E97 40C7 EF6E EC40 9795 2D81 924A > 6996 0993 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
