How do I tell what caused my machine to crash?

How do I tell what caused my machine to crash?

The crash messages will usually be displayed on the console, and are
usually logged to /var/adm/messages via syslog as well after a warm
reboot. In older versions of Solaris, the "dmesg" command may also
show crash messages. If your system repeatedly crashes with similar
looking errors, try searching through the patch list on the Sun
patch database for a description that matches your machine.

In versions of Solaris 2 up to and including Solaris 2.6, uncomment
the "savecore" line in the file /etc/init.d/sysetup to enable crash
dumps. As of Solaris 7 and later, crash dumps are enabled by
default; see the manual page for dumpadm(1M) for information on how
to customize system dump configuration.

To report a crash dump, you need a symbolic traceback for it to be
useful to the person looking at it. Type the following:
cd /var/crash/`hostname`
echo '$c' | adb -k unix.0 vmcore.0

The "crash" utility can be useful for analyzing crash dumps for
Solaris up to and including Solaris 8. "Crash" has been superseded
by "mdb" (modular debugger) as of Solaris 8.

Thanks to Dan Astoorian


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