GSoC Project: Automated Kernel Crash Reporting System - Discussion

[tzabal at it.teithe.gr]

Hello Community,

I have the project "Automated Kernel Crash Reporting System" for this  
GSoC and I would like to discuss my plans about it before starting the  
coding on May 21.

I have created a page in the FreeBSD Wiki  
(http://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2012/AutomatedKernelCrashReportingSystem)  
where I describe in details the architecture of the system.

Here are some points that I would like to be discussed:

* The implementation of the kcrashreporter is planned to be done in  
two shell scripts. The first shell script is a rc.d script and the  
second is the actual program. I choose to code it in shell because  
kcrashreporter invokes the kgdb to collect the necessary debugging  
information. I think that using the shell instead of traditional  
programming language for this kind of job is more straightforward and  
natural. Do you have a different opinion?

* Can you recommend a secure way of sending a report from a FreeBSD  
system to the Central Collector machine?

* Which data do you want kcrashreporter to collect? At the moment I  
have considered the panic message, the backtrace, the version level of  
the release, the hardware platform (uname -vm) and the configuration  
file of the panicked kernel (config -x `sysctl -n kern.bootfile`).

* Do you propose a different Web Server than the Apache HTTP Server?  
For example, on my initial planning I had included MySQL as the  
selected DBMS and after some discussions I changed to PostgreSQL.


Any comment regarding the project is more than welcome.

Thank you,
Tzanetos

----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.