2. System Hangs and Panics

Anyone with any system administration experience has been there. You are in the middle of some production cycle or are just working on the desktop when the computer, for some mysterious reason, hangs or displays some elaborate screen message with a lot of HEX addresses and perhaps a stack of an offending NULL dereference.

What to do? In this chapter, we hope to provide an answer as we discuss kernel panics, oops, hangs, and hardware faults. We examine what the system does in these situations and discuss the tools required for initial analysis. We begin by discussing OS hangs. We then discuss kernel panics and oops panics. Finally, we conclude with hardware machine checks.

It is important to identify whether you are ...

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