Friday, July 8, 2011

How to set up Red Hat's Network Crash Dump Facility


Installation


The Redhat utility Netdump, will provide fault analysis for software or hardware bugs that cause a system crash.
Netdump saves an image of the first 4GB of memory to a server on the network
To configure netdump we need to ensure that we have the rpm netdump installed on the client
To check for this rpm type rpm -qa | grep netdump and you should see something like netdump-0.7.4-2, 0.7.4-2 is the version I used at the time of writting but may be different for you
On the server the rpm netdump-server should be installed
Again to check type rpm -qa | grep netdump and something like netdump-server-0.7.4-2 should be displayed, again the version may be different for you but should be same as the client
If either of these rpms are not installed, locate on the installation media and install by typing something similar to the following
rpm -ivh netdump-server-0.7.4-2.i386.rpm
or
rpm -ivh netdump-0.7.4-2.i386.rpm
depending on whether you are installing the server or client
Once the rpms are installed we will need to do a small amount of configuration

Server configuration


The crash dump will be written to /var/crash so ensure that filesystem containing this directory has over 4GB of free space for each client likely to write here
Set a passwd for the netdump user, this user will already be created so just type the following
passwd netdump
And choose a passwd
Enable netdump-server to start at boot time, type chkconfig netdump-server on
Then start the server, type service netdump-server start

Client configuration


Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/netdump and add a line similiar to NETDUMPADDR=192.168.1.2 and specify the ip-address of the netdump server
We now need to set up the netdump init script to send a dynamic random key to the server
Run service netdump propagate and give the netdump users password previously setup on the netdump server
This only has to be done once on setup
We then need to enable the netdump client to start on boot up, type chkconfig netdump on
Then start the client service right now, type service netdump start
And that is it, hopefully now if your client crashes a crash dump should be saved in /var/crash on the netdump server for later analysis

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