Logging panic messages

[Chuck Swiger]

Tony Arcieri wrote:
> I originally configured a dumpdev only to discover that the size of swap must
> exceed physical memory by 1MB in order for it to work, which it does not,
> unfortunately.  So dumpdev won't work to collect crash data.

You might set hw.physmem to a smaller value in loader.conf to fit within the 
amount of swapspace which is available:

         set hw.physmem=<value>                  MAXMEM (i386 only)

                 Limits the amount of physical memory space available to
                 the system to <value> bytes.  <value> may have a k, M or G
                 suffix to indicate kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes
                 respectively.  Note that the current i386 architecture
                 limits this value to 4GB.

> What I'm really in need of is some way to determine the cause of reboots,
> and panic messages aren't being logged.  I've heard of patches to the
> kernel which would provide ways to do this such as network console support
> (my colo provider doesn't provide serial consoles).

last and dmesg don't give you anything, hmm?  That's unforunate, hmm, you 
might try leaving an ssh session logged in doing a tail -f on 
/var/log/messages and see whether you can get anything from that.