News Group Posts

panic dump analysis

From: Bela Lubkin <belal@sco.com>
Subject: Re: SCO OSR5.0.6 System Crashed during LoneTAR Verify
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 00:51:15 GMT
References: <Pine.UW2.4.21.0306141804390.10951-100000@ris7.UniXpress.com>
<bcgbo0$n1l$1@pcls4.std.com> 

Tony Lawrence wrote:

> Lucky Leavell <scomisc@unixpress.com> wrote:
> 
> >One excellent reason to go this route is the thought of having a novice
> >try to write down all those registers and hex contents without making a
> >mistake, not to mention the time required while their users are breathing
> >down their neck.  (I am nearly an hour away so I can't just pop over
> >myself.)
> 
> Well, as I said, most of the time it's hardware and the analysis is
> not going to help you a lot.  There's also the issue of time: ripping
> out ram is quick, simple and cheap.. it may not be the issue at all,
> but it's easy to do.  Other things like nics are easy too.  It's 
> also often easy enough to pop the drives into a whole other box.

I guess we have very different ideas of what is easy.  Running a couple
of commands and posting the resulting text on USENET is easy, to me.
Scheduling some down time, (possibly driving or flying across the
country to the problem system), getting everyone off the system,
shutting down, swapping out bits of hardware, bringing it back up, then
waiting days or weeks to see whether an intermittent panic has stopped
-- that's not easy.

> But we all approach things with the tools and skills we feel most
> confident in.  One of the things we seldom see here is examples of
> tracing panics and the diagnosis.  If I remember, Bela might have
> blessed us with something like that once or twice, and I probably
> saved it at my site, but we sure don't see much of that.  That,
> I think, lends weight to my argument that it's a confusing swamp
> for most of us and that few have gotten useful results.

It's only a made-up number, but I would estimate that I have helped
solve about 100 different problems by way of analyzing panic stack
traces posted on USENET.  Perhaps your internal counter of these doesn't
increment because your eyes glaze over when the discussion goes in that
direction.

dejagoogle search for "panic group:comp.unix.sco.misc author:bela" finds
300+ articles.

Without going back to analyze those articles in detail, I am simply
stating from _my_ experience that a symbolic trace of the panic is _very
useful_ in a large proportion of panic cases.  By "large proportion" I
mean something more than 20% and less than 80% -- I can't be more
accurate than that without going off to do a bunch of analysis which
would be a waste of time.  Even if it is only 20% likely to help, it is
still totally worth the poster's while to obtain and post a stack trace.

Heck, even knowing the operating system version number is probably only
_really_ needed about 20% of the time, but we _all_ whine if a poster
doesn't include that...

>Bela<

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