NAME 

Friendly Dumpadm SMF Service, version 0.1



DESCRIPTION 

This is a prototype of a simple SMF service which can be used instead of
the default dumpadm service.

The dumpadm service runs at boot, configuring the kernel's crash dump behaviour
as well as invoking the savecore(1M) to retrieve any saved crash dumps from the
swap or dump devices.

This friendly version also creates a simple summary of the crash, then sleeps,
periodically checking for the first Xsession to start - a user logging into
the machine using a graphical user interface.

Once this is detected, the script displays that crash summary in a popup
dialog box, and then asks the user if they would like to mail the summary
to the developers.

In the future, we would like to offer the user the option of compressing the
crash dump, and automatically uploading it to some central repository. This
is not yet implemented.  More work would be needed to define privileges
via RBAC for a user to achieve this, and users would need to be granted
that privilege before being allowed to access the crash dump, which may
contain sensitive data.


INSTALLATION

To install, as root, run the following commands:

# cp usr/bin/dumpadm-dialog.ksh /usr/bin
# cp lib/svc/method/svc-friendly-dumpadm /lib/svc/method
# svccfg import friendly-dumpadm.xml
# svcadm disable svc:/system/dumpadm:default
# svcadm enable svc:/system/dumpadm:friendly

It's important to disable the default dumpadm service before enabling this
new one.


SEE ALSO

More background about this service, along with implementation comments can be
found in web log posts at:

http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/friendly_dumpadm_0_1
http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/being_more_user_friendly_with


The Friendly Dumpadm SMF Service is released under the terms of the CDDL.