Re: The stability crisis

Kim Petersen (kim@vejlegruppen.dk)
02 Jul 1999 14:45:00 +0200


Jes Sorensen <Jes.Sorensen@cern.ch> writes:

> >>>>> "Brian" == brian <brian@worldcontrol.com> writes:
>
> Brian> I would like my oops'ing systems to send the oops to another
> Brian> system via an ethernet interface. How about a UDP packet?
> Brian> Nice connectionless protocol. Compile the MAC/IP address into
> Brian> the kernel. Opps occurs, build the UDP packet with the measly
> Brian> 2K oops message in it and send.
>
> Before you can do this you need a hardware address for the receiver,
> this can of course be done by putting it statically into this special
> driver. Alternatively you need a fair amount of a network stack to run
> before you can first get the hw address via ARP, and then send out a
> message with the oops info. Now this requires a sorta functional
> Ethernet driver to get anywhere and often your interrupts are dead.
Why couldn't the kernel get the hw-address via ARP, at the stage just
after network has come up? There would probably not be any reason to
change this very often. And it should be possible to send this package
without much of a stack then?
>
> So in principle one could hack something like this, but it will be
> nasty, it will require a special Ethernet driver going in,
> initializing the card from scratch (it could be the interface that
> crashed) and then send out the packet.
Same should go for the serialdriver (I know network is more of a
problem ;) And I for one could live with the fact that an oops isn't
send if the netdriver was down (at least you'd know the problem was
in the network code).
>
> To be quite frank, it is less of a hassle to hook up a serial cable,
> I cannot see any reason why people keep refusing to do this.
>
Because as Brian said: it is a major hassle, we allready have a large
amount of cable-spaghetti just connecting network, if we also have to
have a lot of serialcable's - more than those to routers/livingstons :(
That really amount to chaos.

-- 
Mvh. Kim Petersen   \  | Tlf:      +4575727633 |  / Storhaven 12
System Administrator \ | Fax:      +4575727619 | /    7100 Vejle
Vejlegruppen/Net4you  \| Email: kim@net4you.dk |/   DK - Danmark

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