First of all I realized that CentOS 4.5 had netdump and netdump-server packages available. In the attempt to solve a crash that occurs about every 2 weeks I already reinstalled the OS and upgraded to CentOS5 and I just received and setup a box that I was going to use as the netconsole server.

To my surprise the netdump packages are no where to be found (I see kdump) and I cannot see netconsole anywhere (but I do see a kernel object / module) for netconsole.

So I am at a loss. I don't think I really need the whole dump as I would not know what to do with it but I would like to see what the system was doing when the crash occurred. I think netconsole is more of what I am after. For some reason I thought that netdump provided both the console and the dump and that is why I was going to use those facilities.

Basically I need to see the console messages that are around when the system crashes so I can use it to determine what is going on or to supply it to someone that could help.

Any Suggestions?

Thanks

I'm not sure what netdump is, but looking at local log messages in /var/log does not record anything?

Thanks for your post. To answer your question when the system crashes it crashes !!! There is NOTHING in the logs. We are running nightly rsync backups over ssh and all you will see is an ssh connection made and then nothing else.

I was able to scrap enough examples together to get netconsole to work. Netconsole basically will send your console log (dmesg) to another port/machine. I have it going to a syslogd on another machine right now. NetDump is a similar beast with the ability to send the kernel crash dump image over the network. Many times when a crash occurs it can be due to loss of filesystem or hard drive thus having another avenue of sending the core images is very useful.

When I get a moment I will post the commands I ran to get it started. However I am still lacking one thing and that is how to load a module so that it starts up at runtime. I tried putting it in modprobe.conf but that did not work. Do you know how to do that?