I have a managed server, whenever the server crash. The provider will reboot the system straight away. I am just wondering if there is a way I can know why it crash in the first place?

Well you might want to check if there are any "interesting" messages in /var/log/messages. In fact you could check any/all of the log files in /var/log.

Frank

Also look for core files. Sometimes when a program goes boom it creates a core dump. If you know a little bit (or maybe a lotta bit) about programming you can use a tool like gdb to debug the core file.

Not necessarily for the faint of heart.

Originally posted by uuallan
Also look for core files. Sometimes when a program goes boom it creates a core dump. If you know a little bit (or maybe a lotta bit) about programming you can use a tool like gdb to debug the core file.

Not necessarily for the faint of heart.

Actually you don't need to know a lot just to know which program it came from. Just issue:

file core

from a shell prompt. That should at least tell you what program created the core file.

The bad news is that the core file can be scattered anywhere on your server (usually in the directory where the executable is). You can use the following commands to find the core files:

cd /
find . -name core -print

That will cd to your root directory, then find any files named core and print them.

It's a good idea to look for core files every once-in-a-while and delete them. Then can be huge.

Frank