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Servicing the IBM ServeRAID M5015 SAS/SATA II Controllers –Problem Determination - Logs
Logs and Debugging Techniques
There are several ways of gathering information for problem determination
purposes. When directed, pull logs and use all normal troubleshooting procedures
as outlined in the PDSG for the system type you are working with.
OS Level Debug
• Information available at the OS layer
o Varies greatly from system to system
o Debuggers available for different OS
o Crash analysis tools available for tier 1 OS
• BSODs and other crash debugs are difficult to infer information from. While
useful, they may not provide information directly related or easily tied to the
original failure.
• Screen shots or full recording of kernel debug output from various OS failures
should be recorded if possible.
• BSODs and other crashes may occur hours after the original failure, depending
on symptoms. (for example, "KERNEL_DATA_IN_PAGE_ERROR" BSOD will
not occur until the OS tries to do a paging operation. Depending upon system
configuration this could be up to several hours after the initial failure).
• Kernel dumps are often useful for post failure analysis (this is extremely helpful in
some failures, but with the boot controller failures it is not always available).
System Event Logs
• Windows, Netware, and Linux have event logs:
o Windows event logs are viewed via the event viewer under
administrator tools on most flavors of windows
o Linux logs are typically in /var/log/messages
• RAID software does not typically log events in the system event logs
• System events may also be useful in correlating times of OS failures with other
logs and debugs to show when the OS saw events occurring as well as
identifying unique footprints for failures
• Additional debug levels are sometimes available under some OS layers
• Linux can have the amount of debug increased via the logging daemons
• Windows 3rd party utilities can output additional information under some
conditions (Storlib debug builds), and are very useful if combined with debug
drivers and libraries (dlls)
October 2009
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XW5196r110.pdf
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