Stability of RELENG_5_4 with dual Xeon

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> On Mon, May 16, 2005 at 05:57:33PM -0700, Jorge Aldana wrote:
>> Well now I don't feel alone.
>>
>> 5.2.1, 5.3, 5.4 I've gotten to lock up a workstation, with Nvidia-driver as
>> well though, htt-on, htt-off, only SHED_4BSD . Now with a new NetApp server
>> amd locks up as well but not the whole workstation, mounts to other servers
>> ok, nfs issue. Our FreeBSD count is getting low now due to these issues.
>>
>> All I need is a howto on getting the dump for the NFS issue so I can send
>> something but on the lockups are total lockups, nothing in the logs its
>> like somebody shot a freeze gun on the system, a hard reboot then its back
>> (after a fsck on the system disk) but nothing in the log as if time
>> stopped....
>
> See the developers handbook, which has a chapter on kernel debugging.

Just curious here ... there used to be a fantastic kernel module that 
allowed you to do a 'coredump' across the network, which I used way back 
when I didn't have enough swap space to do it ...

Which brings to mind ... has anyone every tried to do a 'console over 
tcp/ip' that would send everything it could to a remote monitoring 
machine?  There are several cases where, for some reason, you can no 
longer do logging to syslog, which can be critical for debugging purposes 
if you have no other way of knowing 'cause' of a crash/reboot ...

I realize that you can do alot of this at the hardware level, but for a 
remote server that hasn't been setup for this, suddenly causing problems, 
this might be a means of getting some sort of information ... even a 'gdb 
over tcp' would be cool, if that was possible ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy at hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664