Chapter 35. Once Is Not Enough

When we talked about the savecore program in Chapter 3, we said that sometimes it is quite helpful to have more than one crash from a system. This case history provides an excellent example of this advice.

A city council in England suddenly started experiencing frequent crashes on one of their Sun SPARCstations. Once they enabled savecore, they kept it enabled. Thus, they were able to send us several system crash dumps. Together, we will look at two of them.

The first captured crash

The first crash was not captured, because the savecore program had not been enabled. After the system rebooted, the customer called Sun’s United Kingdom Answer Centre for assistance. He was advised how to use savecore and was told what to ...

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