Introduction to Core Dump Analysis (ST-375)

Prerequisite courses include:

• Intermediate System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System (SA-239)
• Advanced System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System (SA-299)

To succeed fully in this course, students should be able to:

• Administer the Solaris OS on a Sun server
• Understand basic operating system concepts
• Use a World Wide Web (WWW) browser, such as the Netscape browser
• Manipulate files and directories on a UNIX file system
• Be familiar with fault analysis and problem-solving techniques
• Access the messages file
• Modify OpenBoot PROM (OBP) variables
• Use the SunSolve(SM) program effectively
• Have a SunSolve account to access other than the free collections
• Modify swap partition sizes
• Have some familiarity with C programming concepts and syntax

Delegates will learn how to:

• Distinguish software-caused system crashes from hardware-caused system crashes
• Retrieve initial analysis information from a crash dump using Solaris CAT, ACT, the adb debugger, and the mdb debugger
• Distinguish among unique panic string, bad trap, and hang crash dumps
• Identify appropriate SunSolve search strings for unique panic string and bad trap crash dumps
• Use the SunSolve program to find bugs and cases related to the crash dumps or error messages
• Given a C structure declaration, describe how the data structure is stored in memory and how it looks when displayed by Solaris CAT, the adb debugger, and the mdb debugger
• Describe the major kernel subsystems and use Solaris CAT, the adb debugger, and the mdb debugger to display the subsystems’ related data structures

The Introduction to Crash Dump Analysis and the SunOS Kernel course provides students with essential skills to diagnose and resolve system problems, beginning with whether a system problem is due to hardware or software. If it’s hardware, which piece of hardware is causing the problem? If it’s software, is there a patch that fixes this problem? What tools can be used to help identify the causes of system problems? Where can they be obtained, and how are they used? This course helps learners to answer these questions and to identify and resolve basic Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) problems successfully.