Snapshotting a system before fixing it

[Kelly Jones]

When a critical service on a system goes down, fixing it is top priority.

Unfortunately, this makes doing a post-mortem analysis more
difficult-- after you've fixed the problem, doing "ps", "mailq", or
whatever isn't that helpful.

Question: has anyone written a script that quickly snapshots (saves to
a file) the "important" values of a system?

You could then quickly run "snapshot.pl" before fixing the system, and
examine the output of snapshot.pl later at your leisure.

If I wrote something like this, it would dump the output of "ps -aux
-www", "mailq -v" (maybe), and a few other commands to
/tmp/snapshot.`date` or something.

Has this wheel already been invented?

-- 
We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective group that's trying
to understand and assimilate technology. We feel that resistance to
new ideas and technology is unwise and ultimately futile.