Crash investigation

Lijsterbes

A headless little server that I've been running on Obarun has recently started to randomly crash. Only a hard reset will get contact with the machine back up. I'd like to investigate what causes the crashes, but I don't know where logs from previous runs can be found that log system problems which may indicate where to find the fault. Where do you look on an Obarun system?

eric

First sorry for my late approval. I didn't notice that i need to connect to see pending approval. The mail sender apparently do not work properly.
So, you can view each log of service with :

# 66-inservice <name_of_service>

You also can see all service running on your machine :

# 66-intree -zg

If 66-inservice complain about missing tree, just use the -t option to give it the name of the tree where to find the service

# 66-inservice -t <treename> <service_name>

Another place to see log can be /var/log.
Also take a look of the output of dmesg command.
Maybe you also can look at /var/log/pacman.conf to see package installed at last update and investigate new version of some package.
You can view the log of the boot at /run/66/log/0/current file. You cannot view preview boot log, this file only contain the current one.

Lijsterbes

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, dmesg doesn't seem to store any information about the previous run [ie before the crash and the new boot], and the same seems to be true for many logs.

In the mean time, I found out what was crashing the system [the cron deamon was writing humongous amounts of data to a deleted but unclosed file until it filled up the disk. Sending task output to /dev/null instead of allowing cron-initiated programs to write to standard out solved the problem, no crashes since], so my interest is now mostly academic!