TABLE OF CONTENTS If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
When a problem crops up on a Tru64 UNIX system, the initial symptoms may or may not be sufficient to determine its root cause. Therefore, you will occasionally need to avail yourself of some of the system's tools to isolate the problem down to the failing component. Luckily, Tru64 UNIX provides an array of tools and facilities to aid the troubleshooting process. Your task is to choose the correct tool to use or log files to examine in order to find the information you need. Our task is to familiarize you with the tools available to make your troubleshooting tasks as easy as possible.
In this chapter, we discuss the major troubleshooting facilities and tools available for the Tru64 UNIX operating system. Specifically, we will cover the following four broad categories:
System-level error-reporting facilities
Process-level reporting facilities
System troubleshooting tools
Kernel debugging tools
These categories are discussed in the following sections.
In this section, we introduce some of the facilities and tools available on a Tru64 UNIX system for detecting and analyzing errors. Some of these are nearly identical to their counterparts in other versions of UNIX; others are unique to Tru64 UNIX. For example, readers familiar with another vendor's UNIX product will find the Tru64 UNIX syslog facility to be very similar to what they have seen before, whereas the binary error log facility would not...
