Installation guide

Chapter 5. Reporting Software Failures

You can take advantage of Red Hat Satellite's software failure reporting capabilities and the Automatic

Bug Reporting T ool (ABRT) to extend the overall reporting functionality of your systems. T his extended

functionality allows your clients to automatically report software failures captured by ABRT to the

Satellite server, and also to process the captured failures in a centralized fashion. You can use either

the webUI or the API to process these failure reports.

5.1. Installing Software Failure Reporting Tools

The following procedure describes how to install Red Hat Satellite tools for ABRT on clients.

Procedure 5.1. T o Use the Soft ware Failure Reporting Functionality:

1. Log into your client system as the root user.

2. Install the spacewalk-abrt package on your client systems. T his package installs the abrt package

as a dependency.

# yum install spacewalk-abrt

Note

Neither the abrt nor spacewalk-abrt packages are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

5.2. Using Software Failure Reporting Tools

The spacewalk-abrt package has two important components:

The configuration file for ABRT : /etc/libreport/events.d/spacewalk.conf

The spacewalk-abrt utility: /usr/bin/spacewalk-abrt

The configuration file instructs the abrt daemon to use the /usr/bin/spacewalk-abrt utility to

automatically report every software failure that occurs on the system to your Satellite server. T his is a

fully automated process and ordinarily does not require any human intervention.

Use the Red Hat Satellite Web UI to view software failure reports from clients. For more information, see

the Red Hat Satellite User Guide.

5.3. Manually Reporting Software Failures

Use the spacewalk-abrt utility to manually report software failures to your Satellite server. The

following procedure shows how to perform a manually send a software failure report.

Procedure 5.2. T o manually report software failures

1. Use the abrt-cli list parameter to display a list of existing failure reports.

Chapter 5. Reporting Software Failures