Summary: system crash log

From: Kirkland, Mike # IHTUL <mike.kirkland_at_ndchealth.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 12:45:52 -0600

Thanks to Dr. Tom Blinn, Chris Ruhnke, Uwe Lienig, and
alan_at_nabeth.cxo.cpqcorp.net, and bill.melvin_at_esc.edu for there fast
responses.

I will use Dr. Blinn suggestion and go pull some tapes and look at the dates
in question. Attached below are their suggestions.


> We had a power outage a couple of weeks ago. Our systems all went down for
> about 4 hours.
> How can I get a log of the time it crashed and when it came back up.
>
> I used the uerf -r 300, 301 for startup and shutdown times but did not
give
> me the info that I was lookup for.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mike Kirkland
> NDC Health

Did you look at /var/adm/messages? You *might* find some clues.
Also, look at the daemon logs in /var/adm/syslog.dated but that
recycles after about a week, you need to look soon after your
systems crash.

In general, in a power outage, nothing is logged when you go down
(there is no time) and because the system didn't panic, nothing
is done as a crash dump, but knowing the last log file updated in
the /var/adm/syslog.dated directories, together with the stuff in
/var/adm/messages on reboot, usually provides some clues.

Tom
 
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==============================================
Alan's below


        Some versions of the operating system logged regular time
        stamps in the error log. I don't recall what the record
        type is though. If you can find one of those before the
        boot time, that will offer a hint.

        I don't know of anything that actively logs current time,
        but you may want to look through what log files your
        system has and see if any do. Most of the log files are
        somewhere under /var/adm.
==========================
Chris' below

uerf -r 300 will tell you when the systems booted up after the powerfail.

Unless you have your systems on a UPS that can trigger a "logical"
shutdown, there will be no log entry available to tell you when the systems
went down; because they just stopped running when the electron flow dropped
to zero.

--CHRis

Chris H. Ruhnke
Systems Management Integration Professional
Mid-Range Technical Services
IBM Global Services
St. Louis, MO

Office: (314) 233-7314
Pager: (800) 759-8888 PIN 8714690


O'Toole's Law: Murphy is an optimist.

====================================
Uwe's below

Look for /var/adm/messages. If this file has never been touched since the
first
boot (and usually hasn't been) every boot puts an entry in the following
form:

<date> <time> <hostname> vmunix: Alpha boot:

May be there is a log short before the outage. Then you will have some kind
of
information. If this system has no messages written for a long time you are
very
much out of luck. uerf aka binlog only logs 'invoked' shutdowns. Since the
outage isn't a 'normal' shutdown it isn't logged (except you have a UPS and
some
kind of UPS watching software).
============================
Bill's below

check /var/adm/crash/crash-data.<n>
where <n> is the number of the crash dump.

there's also crashdc(8) but I have never
used it.



Mike Kirkland
Unix System Administrator
National Data Corporation
Phone: (918) 481-2817
Fax: (918) 481-4275
mike.kirkland_at_ndchealth.com <mailto:mike.kirkland_at_ndchealth.com>
NDC®| HEALTH
6100 South Yale Avenue
Suite 1900
Tulsa, OK 74136
Received on Tue Dec 18 2001 - 18:47:48 NZDT

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