[Techtalk] Diagnosing server problems

R. Daneel Olivaw linuxchix at r-daneel.com
Thu Sep 29 16:42:10 EST 2005


Hi,

> Given that this is a production server with clients using it, I'm not 
> going to start learning how to install things on it!  I do have a
> couple  other machines I can play with, but they're running different
> distros,  SuSE 7.3, and Debian 3.1.  Is atop likely to help me enough
> that I  should work around this?

Well, atop not only shows system status as 'top' (well, quite better
than top), but also can log continuously system activity into a log file
you may 'playback' later. This could show you system activity during the
outage after you can log in again. 'atop' runs as a service by default.

I remember I downloaded redhat rpms and installed them smoothly. The
only tricky part, is finding the way to read old logs again. They are
stored somewhere in /var/log I think ... need to check at work today.

bye,

R. Daneel Olivaw,
The Human Robot Inside.


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