Bill Sommerfeld's Weblog

Friday September 19, 2008

Knowing when a crash dump is complete

Since SMF goes out of its way to let services start in parallel, and dumpadm is one of those services, it might not be done by the time you log in to start investigating the crime scene.

It's annoying to have to periodically poll to see if it's done (sometimes it takes a while) so you can do something like:

  cd  /var/crash/$(hostname); svcadm -v enable -s dumpadm; mdb -k N

and then go about your business until you see an mdb prompt in that window.

This relies on the the -s option to svcadm (which causes it to wait until the service is done attempting to start) as well as the fact that enabling an already-enabled service is a no-op.