[CentOS] Diagnosing random hangs

[Daniel de Kok]

On Mon, December 18, 2006 10:17 pm, Mark Belanger wrote:
> I have many different centos machines that are hanging
> regulary.  I believe this is due to something our application
> is doing - not a centos specific problem.

A normal unprivileged userland application should not be able to bring
down the kernel. Do you use any additional drivers, e.g. for the serial
bus? If so, it is a good idea to enable kernel crash dumps, and send it to
your driver developers to analyze the bug.

Other than that, you could (in no particular order):

- Let syslog send messages to some remote site.
- As others suggested, use remote X or a serial console to be able to
track important messages.
- 'systrace -f' the X11 program, and redirect the output somewhere safe,
to see the last actions that were performed by the program.

With kind regards,
Daniel de Kok