Installation guide

13
Administering Events and Errors
This chapter provides information on the following topics:
• Event logging, which is a way to record informational and error
messages that are generated by the system. You use the event logs to
solve system problems or verify system operations and you can
configure event logging to select events in which you have a particular
interest. Understanding and configuring the event-logging facilities is
described in Section 13.1 and Section 13.2.
• Recovering the event logs after a system crash is described in
Section 13.3.
• System log files require disk space and may periodically require
removal and archiving to save space. Maintenance of log files is
described in Section 13.4.
• When a system or program halts abnormally a crash dump file or a core
file may be created. Options for configuring the crash dump facility and
for storing and naming core files are described in Section 13.5 and
Section 13.6
• Certain systems allow you to monitor the status of the system
hardware, such as temperature and power status. Environmental
Monitoring is described in Section 13.7
A related topic is use of the system exerciser tools, which are described in
Appendix F.
13.1 Understanding the Event-Logging Facilities
The Tru64 UNIX operating system uses two mechanisms to log system
events:
• The system event-logging facility
• The binary event-logging facility
The log files that the system and binary event-logging facilities create have
the default protection of 640, are owned by root, and belong to the system
group. You must have the proper authority to examine the files.
The following sections describe the event-logging facilities.
Administering Events and Errors 13–1