kdump failing with "Cannot opendir" and "Not a directory"

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 3
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 4

Situation

Kdump has been configured to only keep a number of old cores.

Kdump has been configured to save cores in the same directory where application cores are being written.

In the directory where kdump should write his core, there are more application cores then the defined number of kerneldumps to be saved.

The kdump process stops with the following message:

INFO: Deleting core.nvcoa.17661.
Cannot opendir(/root/var/local/dumps/core.nvcoa.17661). (Not a directory)
Last command failed (255).

Resolution

The location of kdump cores and application cores should be different.

The location of the kdump cores can be set using YaST or YaST2. Also this can be set in /etc/sysconfig/kdump with the option KDUMP_SAVEDIR.

The location of application dumps is being set in /etc/sysctl.conf with the option kernel.core_pattern.

After changing the options, a reboot is needed.

Disclaimer

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