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Diagnostic tools for RHEL 4/5?

SysAdmin's,

I am relatively new to Redhat, but very experienced in Sun Solaris. Recently, 2 of my companies' RHEL 5 servers have experienced a few crashes. Core dumps are not enabled. But even if they were, how readable are they? A cursory check of the web shows no other valid tools to identify problems within Redhat. I am hoping some of you could identify tools such as Sun's prtdiag, Sun VTS, or the OK prompt's diag-switch.

Thanks,

Phillip Pacheco

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Permalink Reply by Aaron Brown on September 15, 2009 at 8:09pm

Have you tried calling Red Hat? The only valuable service that paying the big bucks for RHEL provides is technical support. They should be able to help you out. The concept of a generic diagnostic tool for a Linux operating system doesn't really make a lot of sense - what do /var/log/messages and dmesg say? Was it a kernel panic?

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Permalink Reply by Phillip Pacheco on September 15, 2009 at 9:17pm

I suppose that I didn't consider calling Redhat because I don't know the contract status with my client. That would make sense :-P.

I guess I was using this problem as an opportunity to learn more about RHEL and to discover what diagnostic tools might be availabe. I found and downloaded a Linux version of 'prtdiag', but it revealed very little.

I have since isolated the problem as being related to ClearCase's MVFS after yet another crash. I will be passing this problem off to the client's ClearCase guy.

Thanks for the info.

Phillip Pacheco