Cisco IOS Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Creating Exception Dump Files

Problem

Your router is having serious problems and you need to create an exception dump to forward to Cisco’s TAC.

Solution

To create an exception dump of a router’s memory after a failure, you need to configure the exception dump command, as well as telling the router how automatically transfer this information to a server:

Router1#configure terminal 
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
Router1(config)#ip ftp source-interface Loopback0
Router1(config)#ip ftp username ijbrown
Router1(config)#ip ftp password ijpassword
Router1(config)#exception protocol ftp
Router1(config)#exception region-size 65536
Router1(config)#exception dump 172.25.1.3
Router1(config)#end
Router1#

Discussion

This is the one recipe in this book that we hope none of our readers ever need to use. The main reason for creating an exception dump of your router memory contents is to help Cisco’s TAC in diagnosing catastrophic software problems with one of your routers. When you have these types of extreme problems, however, the TAC will often ask to do an exception dump on the router. So we have included this recipe so that you’ll know what to do if it ever becomes necessary.

An exception dump is a snapshot of the router’s memory contents taken just before a software error forces the router to reload. The router has to transfer this information to a server because it is too much information to store in nonvolatile storage.

The dump actually creates two files, one of the ...