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I have forgotten to describe a really handy function when you analyse a crash dump. Solaris has an in-memory buffer for the console messages. In the case you write a crash dump, obviously this messages are written into the crash dump as well.

The Solaris Operating Environment has several functions to enable the user or the support engineer in the case something went wrong. Crash and core dumps are an invaluable resource to find the root cause of a problem. Don´t throw them away without looking at them.

Okay, now you have all this crash and core dumps, it would be nice to do something useful with it. Okay, i show you just some basic tricks to get some insight into the state of a system when it wrote a crash dump.

Solaris has mechanisms to control the behaviour of dump mechanisms. These mechanisms are different for crash and core dumps.

Okay, a dumps are not only a consequence of errors. You can force the generation of both kinds. This is really useful when you want to freeze the current state of the system or an application for further examination.

No software is without errors. This is a basic law of computer science. And when there is no bug in the software (by a strange kind of luck) your hardware has bugs. And when there are no bugs in the hardware, cosmic rays are flipping bits. Thus an operating system needs some mechanisms to stop a process or the complete kernel at once without allowing the system to write anything back to disk and thus manifesting the corrupted state. This tutorial will cover the most important concepts surrounding the last life signs of a system or an application.