friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) (03/07/89)
Hi folks,
Does anybody out there know if dropping the sysdump partition
on a 3B2/600 is A Bad Thing? We have no need or desire to analyze
any crash dumps, so we've been reclaiming the space when we
repartition. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?
Steve
--
Stephen J. Friedl / V-Systems, Inc. / Santa Ana, CA / +1 714 545 6442
3B2-kind-of-guy / friedl@vsi.com / {attmail, uunet, etc}!vsi!friedl
"Cold beer, hot women, and fast compilers" - mejohn@polyof.UUCP ( John Buck ) (03/08/89)
In article <1068@vsi.COM>, friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes: > Does anybody out there know if dropping the sysdump partition > on a 3B2/600 is A Bad Thing? We have no need or desire to analyze > any crash dumps, so we've been reclaiming the space when we > repartition. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot? I'd be carefull (very very careful) about doing this. If you system should crash, by default it writes its crash/dump info to the dump partition. (partition 3 maybe? i forget off hand)... If you went and put a filesystem there, it will go ahead and scribble Unix dumpings over it. We had this happen on our 3b15. You won't notice the problem until you go to reboot, at which point you will get TONS of fsck errors. I believe that you can set DUMPDEV in /etc/master.d (don't hold me to it), to point to some safe place... tape drive, floppy drive maybe? nodev? Be carefull about your hard disks though... john@polyof.poly.edu trixie!polyof!john
shagar@vpk4.UUCP (Steven Hagar) (03/11/89)
In article <1068@vsi.COM> friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes: > Does anybody out there know if dropping the sysdump partition >on a 3B2/600 is A Bad Thing? If you execute sysdump from firmware, you will be given the option of dumping to the sysdump partition (partition 3 on disk 0), not just the floppy disk, as sysadm(8) describes. More importantly, the 3B2/600 automatically dumps a core image to this disk partition after each panic, so even if you don't want to make your own dump files, you would want this partition available. However, you may be able to recover some space depending on how much memory your 3B2 has. The default partitioning allocates 32768 blocks for sysdump (i.e. enough for 16MB). If you have less memory, you can make the partition smaller (e.g. 16384 blocks for a 3B2 with 8MB RAM). Keep in mind, though, if you add more memory, you will have to go to firmware and repartition your disk again for a larger sysdump partition. -- Steven Hagar . AT&T Canada Inc. . ATTMAIL: !shagar (416) 756-5061 . UUCP: uunet!attcan!shagar
friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) (03/12/89)
In article <1068@vsi.COM>, friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes: > Does anybody out there know if dropping the sysdump partition > on a 3B2/600 is A Bad Thing? We have no need or desire to analyze > any crash dumps, so we've been reclaiming the space when we > repartition. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot? When all else fails, RTF Help Message in the installation script. We've since determined that <sysdump> is not needed. If there is no <sysdump> partition, crash dumps can be unloaded to floppy. It will be a bummer to use a box of floppies, but in the four and a half years we've been using the 3B2, we've never needed/wanted to take a crash dump. -- Stephen J. Friedl / V-Systems, Inc. / Santa Ana, CA / +1 714 545 6442 3B2-kind-of-guy / friedl@vsi.com / {attmail, uunet, etc}!vsi!friedl "I think, therefore I'm a yam." - me
brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) (03/12/89)
On my 3B15, I have the crash dump area pointed at the swap area. It's not going to be swapping at the same time as it's crashing, and since I have no intention of ever doing anything but rebooting if it DOES ever crash, that's good enough for me. I just don't want it spewing on my filesystems on the way down. - Brian
shagar@vpk4.UUCP (Steven Hagar) (03/14/89)
In article <1518@ucsd.EDU> brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) writes: >On my 3B15, I have the crash dump area pointed at the swap area. It's >not going to be swapping at the same time as it's crashing, and since >I have no intention of ever doing anything but rebooting if it DOES ever >crash, that's good enough for me. I just don't want it spewing on >my filesystems on the way down. One of our service technicians recommends getting a dump of memory after a crash, before rebooting the system. He has found that the memory dump can provide useful troubleshooting information, which will be purged when memory is reinitialized during the reboot. His experience in a number of instances has been that rebooting clears the symptoms, but doesn't necessarily correct the problem, and without a memory dump, you might not know until the problem occurs again what the real problem was. Steven Hagar . AT&T Canada Inc. . ATTMAIL: !shagar (416) 756-5061 . UUCP: uunet!attcan!shagar