Red Hat Linux 4: How to enable crash dump during panic

[kenny chia]

Hi
I have a Red Hat ES4 system. Recently the system panic and it rebooted (By ASR). But unlike HP-UX systems there was no crash dump to be found.

How do I configure Linux to create a crash dump during Kernel Panic?

Thanks

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

Unfortunately, it is not trivial. But possible - see this articlehttp://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/08/15/a-quick-overview-of-linux-kernel-crash-dump-analysis/

[Heironimus]

In addition to actual crash dump tools, Red Hat ships netconsole. You can use that to send kernel messages to another host. So far I've had better results with netconsole than with crash dumps, but most of my "crashes" haven't been OS crashes, they've been Oracle's hangcheck watchdog or HP's ASR.

[skt_skt]

Here is the link for setting up Sysrq:
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_80_5559.shtm

Here is the link for setting up Netdump:
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_43_2467.shtm

Please let us know if you need help setting these up.

[kenny chia]

Hi
I have check out netdump but unfortunately the broadcomm bcm5700 network driver cannot support this feature..

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

may be tg3 driver supports netdump?

[kenny chia]

hmmm..
I setup another server which is using the bcm5700 driver and crash it. It managed to dump data to the netdump server.