How to capture and gather a core dump on Linux for unifid

  • 7017556
  • 28-Apr-2016
  • 12-Jan-2017

Environment

NetIQ Privileged Account Manager
NetIQ Privileged User Manager

Situation

How to enable, capture, gather, bundle a core dump on Linux for unifid
How to enable crash dump capture for unifid core files on Linux
How to configure Linux to dump core files with unlimited max core file size

Resolution

Enabling core dumps

Enabling core dumps and disabling the limit for the maximum size of a core dump file require use of ulimit. While there are several ways to set and configure ulimit, it may be easiest to manage directly in the service's init-script. Please follow the steps below to set ulimit appropriately for Privileged Account Manager (PAM) crash dumps:
  1. Set ulimit in the npum startup-script:
    • Edit /etc/init.d/npum
    • Append the following at the top of the script beneath the commented introductory section:
      ulimit -c unlimited
    • Save the file.

  2. Restart the npum service: /etc/init.d/npum restart

Note: Resulting core files could be placed at the root of the filesystem (/).


Manually triggering a core dump (if necessary)

In some troubleshooting scenarios, it may be necessary to trigger the generation of a core dump manually. This can be done by sending a signal that generates a coredump to the process, for example SIGABRT. To send SIGABRT to process 1234, run:
kill -ABRT 1234

Gathering and bundling the core file

Novell-getcore
is a script used to gather and bundle the core file and all associated libraries necessary to analyze the core file. It then creates a tarball with all the information hopefully needed to diagnose the behavior of the crash.
  1. Please download the novell-getcore 1.2.0.8 script to the affected server.
  2. Create a bundle from the specified core file:
    ./novell-getcore -b <core-filename>
    Note: The name of the bundled .tar.gz file should appear when finished.


Gathering system environment information

Detailed analysis of core dumps requires knowledge of the programming language(s), the problematic application (and the libraries and plugins it depends on) is written in, as well as a development environment that matches the environment in which the core dump was taken in terms of architecture as well as application, library and plugin versions. The supportconfig tool (https://www.novell.com/communities/node/2332) provides a convenient way of capturing this environment information.

Additional Information

For additional information, see Enabling Crash Dump Capture in documentation.

To verify a running process is configured with unlimited max core file size, see the following steps:
  1. Determine the PID of the running process:
    pgrep unifi
  2. Verify the limits of each running PID as needed:
    cat /proc/<pid#>/limits | grep core
    Note: Replace pid# with the pid determined from Step 1.