[Lustre-discuss] Lustre Mount Crashing

[Kilian CAVALOTTI]

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).

* having an IPMI-enabled BMC, or any sort of remote-controler card 
  should give you easy access to the machine's console, remotely. Those 
  cards ain't cheap, but if you already got them in your servers, that's
  the good occasion to put them in use.

* 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

HTH,
-- 
Kilian