Re: I want to log all processes when they start

From: Bill Vermillion (bv_at_wjv.com)
Date: 09/27/04 

Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 19:35:02 GMT

In article <8138187a.0409230141.29688946@posting.google.com>,
Jeff <jeff@rt.com> wrote:
>Hey guys, thanks for responding :-)
>
>Dave Hinz writes:
>> What are you actually trying to do? What's your goal?

>The system in question is a remote server, which I manage via ssh.
>>From time to time, approximately once a month (thus evoking
>disparaging remarks about menstruation), the system kind of hangs.
>Frequently in these cases it will still respond to pings, but
>connections to http, smtp, and ssh just time out, so I have to arrange
>for a hard reboot.

In many cases pinging is only good for telling you the power is on.
Many systems will also respond to ping before the OS is fully up
and running, or when the OS is totally locked - as it appears to be
in your case.

>The discussion board for this remote data center
>is full of messages speculating about the cause of this problem (it
>happens to many, apparantly) blaming hardware, kernels, and the disk
>quota manager, among other things. I thought it best to try to do my
>own diagnosis, and I thought that finding out what is running at any
>given moment would be a good start.

It might help to mention what OS is being run, including the
version, and some idea of the hardware.

To find out what is running at any given moment the standard
utilties should let you know.

A great many things are logged. Have you checked your syslog
output. And depending on just what it is you want to log, you
might want to add something to the syslog file to log what is
happening.

>Peter Håkanson writes:
>> You could add some code to crt0.c but beware of huge amounts of
>> output. Be prepared with an alternate boot-media and an old
>> copy of crt0 lib.
>
>Hmm. I was hoping there was already some kind of utility. I can't
>believe I'm the first one in the history of unix to want to do this.
>As far as output goes, I imagined that I'd be dealing with about
>100MB/day at the most -- well within my available disk space and
>bandwidth. Do you think this estimate is way off?
>
>Regards,
>
>Jeff 

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com