Oracle Solaris Crash Analysis Tool 5.3

The Oracle Solaris Crash Analysis Tool Team is happy to announce the availability of release 5.3.  This release addresses bugs discovered since the release of 5.2 plus enhancements to support Oracle Solaris 11 and updates to Oracle Solaris versions 7 through 10.

The packages are available on My Oracle Support - simply search for Patch 13365310 to find the downloadable packages.

Release Notes

General

blast support

The blast GUI has been removed and is no longer supported.

Oracle Solaris 2.6 Support

As of Oracle Solaris Crash Analysis Tool 5.3, support for Oracle Solaris 2.6 has been dropped. If you have systems running Solaris 2.6, you will need to use Oracle Solaris Crash Analysis Tool 5.2 or earlier to read its crash dumps.

New Commands

Sanity Command

Though one can re-run the sanity checks that are run at tool start-up using the coreinfo command, many users were unaware that they were. Though these checks can still be run using that command, a new command, namely sanity, can now be used to re-run the checks at any time.

Interface Changes

scat_explore -r and -t option

The -r option has ben added to scat_explore so that a base directory can be specified and the -t op[tion was added to enable color taggging of the output. The scat_explore sub-command now accepts new options. Usage is:

scat --scat_explore [-atv] [-r base_dir] [-d dest] [unix.N] [vmcore.]N

Where:

-v	Verbose Mode: The command will print messages highlighting what it's doing.
-a	Auto Mode: The command does not prompt for input from the user as it runs.
-d dest	Instructs scat_explore to save it's output in the directory dest instead of the present working directory.
-r base_dir	Instructs scat_explore to save it's under the directory base_dir instead of the present working directory. If it is not specified using the -d option, scat_explore names it's output file as "scat_explore_system_name_hostid_lbolt_value_corefile_name."
-t	Enable color tags. When enabled, scat_explore tags important text with colors that match the level of importance. These colors correspond to the color normally printed when running Oracle Solaris Crash Analysis Tool in interactive mode. Tag Name Definition FATAL An extremely important message which should be investigated. WARNING A warning that may or may not have anything to do with the crash. ERROR An error, usually printer with a suggested command ALERT Used to indicate something the tool discovered. INFO Purely informational message INFO2 A follow-up to an INFO tagged message REDZONE Usually used when prnting memory info showing something is in the kernel's REDZONE.
N	The number of the crash dump. Specifying unix.N vmcore.N is optional and not required.

Example:

$ scat --scat_explore -a -v -r /tmp vmcore.0
#Output directory: /tmp/scat_explore_oomph_833a2959_0x28800_vmcore.0
#Tar filename:     scat_explore_oomph_833a2959_0x28800_vmcore.0.tar
#Extracting crash data...
#Gathering standard crash data collections...
#Panic string indicates a possible hang...
#Gathering Hang Related data...
#Creating tar file...
#Compressing tar file...
#Successful extraction
SCAT_EXPLORE_DATA_DIR=/tmp/scat_explore_oomph_833a2959_0x28800_vmcore.0

Sending scat_explore results

The .tar.gz file that results from a scat_explore run may be sent using Oracle Secure File Transfer. The Oracle Secure File Transfer User Guide describes how to use it to send a file.

The send_scat_explore script now has a -t option for specifying a to address for sending the results. This option is mandatory.

Known Issues

There are a couple known issues that we are addressing in release 5.4, which you should expect to see soon:

• Display of timestamps in threads and clock information is incorrect in some cases.
• There are alignment issues with some of the tables produced by the tool.
  

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