[Crash-utility] crashdc : automatic data collection for new vmcores in text format

[Louis Bouchard]

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Hello everyone.

In a previous life, I was doing Tru64 support and we had a crashdc
script that would collect result of a small set of data out of the crash
dump to a text file every time a new dump would get created. The
advantage of this is to allow a customer to send the basic dump
information in a text format to support engineers for a first pass.
Dumps are getting big these days and it can take days to get the whole
vmcore file.

So I took the idea and recreated the mechanism on linux based on crash.
It's a small shell script that build a crash command file and feeds it
to the crash utility automatically. It can also be invoked manually on
existing dumps rather easily. Here is its format :

$ ./crashdc -h
usage: crashdc [-d level] [-h] [-V] [-x /path/to/crash/exe]
/path/to/namelist /path/to/vmcore /path/to/output/directory

I'm relying on existing kdump mechanism to automate the collection of
data whenever a new vmcore is generated.  Right now, I have it working
on RHEL5, close to be working on SLES11 and not working on SLES10. But
this is not why I'm telling you all this.

I am coming to you to know if there would be some interest in including
those scripts into the crash-utility rpm.  I'm ready to package it
myself and to give those scripts their own home, but since the
unavoidable dependency is to have crash present, I was thinking that it
might be better to have it included with crash.

Right now, here is what is included :

 - /usr/bin/crashdc
 - /usr/bin/run-crashdc-rhel.sh
 - /usr/bin/run-crashdc-sles.sh
 - /usr/bin/run-crashdc-sles11.sh
 - /usr/share/man/man8/crashdc.8

I would like to have your opinion and comments on this suggestion, and
on the value of having such a script available for general use.

Kind Regards,

- --
Louis Bouchard, Linux Support Engineer
Team lead, EMEA Linux Competency Center,
Linux Ambassador, HP

HP Services                       1 Ave du Canada
HP France                         Z.A. de Courtaboeuf
louis.bouchard at hp.com             91 947 Les Ulis
http://www.hp.com/go/linux        France
http://www.hp.com/fr

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