Tim Foster's Weblog

I found a few spare moments to work on the idea I wrote about before - a replacement for the default svc:/system/dumpadm:default service that will show a dialog after the first X user logs in after the system has panicked.

Here's what the dialog looks like:

I've a working prototype now available at friendly-dumpadm-0.1.tar.gz. You might be interested in checking out the README that comes with it.

Rather than replace the existing dumpadm service, I created a new one so there'd be no confusion as to what's running - I'm calling it svc:/system/dumpadm:friendly for now, but comments welcome.

I'm also not entirely sure which mail-alias should be used to send crash summaries to - I'd thought about help [at] opensolaris.org, but wasn't sure if that was the right place, so for now, it just mails these summaries to me.

The "Upload compressed crash dump binary" option isn't implemented yet, partially because we've nowhere to actually upload these binaries to, but also because it will require a bit more work, in terms of setting up an RBAC profile that allows users access to the crash dump, something they're not normally allowed as crash dumps can contain sensitive information.

What's in a panic summary ? Well for now, not much - just the output of the mdb dcmds ::status, ::msgbuf and $c. Can anyone suggest other useful commands that could be added ?

I should point out, this isn't an official Solaris project - it's just me thinking about what sort of things we could have to make OpenSolaris more approachable to folks who perhaps don't know about the wonderful observability features we have - hopefully it'll help answer the question "I was using OpenSolaris and it just spontaneously rebooted! WTF?".