Alright, everyone’s favorite topic system crashes! You know, those moments when your computer suddenly turns into a brick and you can’t do anything except stare at it in frustration?
First things first, let’s start with the basics. When your system crashes, there are usually two types of errors that occur: soft and hard. A soft error is when your computer experiences a minor issue like freezing or slowing down, while a hard error is when it completely shuts down unexpectedly.
Now, Let’s roll with the details. To analyze system crashes in Linux, we can use a tool called syslogd. This program collects and logs all of your system messages, including any errors or warnings that may have occurred during a crash. Here’s how to enable it:
1. Open up your terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T on your keyboard.
2. Type in “sudo nano /etc/syslogd.conf” and hit enter. This will open the syslogd configuration file in Nano, a text editor.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the file and add this line: “* * * /var/log/messages”. Save and exit by pressing Ctrl + X, Y, Enter.
4. Restart your system log daemon with “sudo service syslog restart” or reboot your computer for changes to take effect.
Now that we have syslogd up and running, let’s see how it can help us analyze a hard error. Let’s say you experience an unexpected shutdown while working on a project. When you turn your system back on, open up the terminal again and type in “tail -f /var/log/messages”. This will display the last few lines of messages that have been logged by syslogd.
If you see any errors or warnings related to your recent crash, take note of them. For example:
# This script is used to troubleshoot errors or warnings related to a recent system crash.
# To view the last few lines of messages logged by syslogd, open the terminal and type in "tail -f /var/log/messages".
# This will display the last few lines of messages that have been logged by syslogd.
# The following code displays information about the hardware and kernel panic that occurred during the crash.
# The first line shows the hardware name of the system.
kernel: [ 1234.567] Hardware name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz
# The second line indicates that a kernel panic has occurred and the system is not syncing.
# It also shows the attempted action of killing the init process and the exit code.
kernel: [ 1234.569] Kernel panic not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x0000000a
# The following lines show the values of different registers at the time of the crash.
# These registers hold important information about the state of the system.
# The annotations explain the purpose of each register.
EIP: 0000:00007f8cffe0 # Instruction pointer
eax: 00000000 # Accumulator register
ebx: ffffffff # Base register
ecx: 00000001 # Counter register
edx: 00000000 # Data register
esi: 00000000 # Source index register
edi: 7f8cffd4 # Destination index register
ebp: 00007f923a6c # Base pointer register
esp: 00007fffdf50 # Stack pointer register
eip: 00007f8cffe0 # Instruction pointer
cs: 0010 # Code segment register
ds: 0000 # Data segment register
es: 0000 # Extra segment register
fs: 0000 # F segment register
gs: 0000 # G segment register
ss: 0000 # Stack segment register
This error message tells us that the system experienced a kernel panic, which is essentially when the Linux kernel crashes. The “Attempted to kill init!” part means that the system tried to terminate its initialization process, which can be caused by various issues such as hardware failure or software conflicts.