[GRLUG] Rebooting linux server

[Kevin McCarthy]

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org
> wrote:

> On Fri, 2012-07-06 at 10:13 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Collin Kidder <collink at kkmfg.com> wrote:
> > > On 7/6/2012 9:35 AM, Michael Mol wrote:
> > > I've since set up rsyslog to do remote logging to a second machine. Of
> > > course, now that I've done this the machine has been up for longer
> than a
> > > day so far with no hiccups. But, when it happens again I'll be ready.
> I have
> > > mcelog installed as well so any mce messages will be remote logged.
> > My only fear of remote logging is my suspicion it's not quite as
> > resilient to things like kernel panics as a serial port. But it's a
> > good step.
>
> It is not very resilient.  You *might* get a few of the first messages
> [logging via UDP] but quite likely the network stack will be gone and
> syslog inoperable before the kernel does the sysrq thing and posts its
> dumps.
>
>
There's a kernel module called "netconsole" for just this purpose:

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/netconsole.txt

I'm sure it's still not perfect, and under certain conditions it probably
doesn't work as well as a serial console. But, I have used it in the past
to catch a kernel panic on a headless serial-port-less server, and it
seemed to work pretty well. It caught the panic where a remote syslog did
not.

-Kevin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20120706/1365c88a/attachment.html>