On Jun 02, 2008 10:05 -0700, Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote: > On Monday 02 June 2008 08:35:35 am Charles Taylor wrote: > > Unfortunately, getting the messages off the console (in the machine > > room) means using a pencil and paper (you'd think we have something > > as fancy as a ip-kvm console server, but alas, we do things, ahem, > > "inexpensively" here. > > There are a couple solutions to help you there: > * using a serial console connected to a remote machine (costs a serial > cable and some configuration).
One very practical and low-cost mechanism is to cross-cable the serial console from one machine to its neighbour. Most server-class machines have 2 serial consoles, so you can have an inbound port for the console of the neighbour, and an outbound port configured to be the serial console of that machine. > * and maybe the easiest, most inexpensive (no hardware involved) and > most convenient one: using netdump [1]. You configure a netdump client > on the machine you want to gather logs and traces from, and a > netdump-server on an other host, to receive those messages. This > solution proved to be really efficient in gathering Lustre's debug > logs and crash dumps. > > [1] http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/redhat/netdump/ > and http://docs.freevps.com/doku.php?id=how-to:netdump Yes, LLNL has been using netdump to good effect. It works with the "normal" crashdump utilities like "crash" (modified gdb). It isn't in all kernels, however. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc. _______________________________________________ Lustre-discuss mailing list Lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss