Linux Administration Cookbook

Making a copy of problems for later debugging

In this section, we're going to talk about copying files for later debugging. Frequently, we find ourselves on systems where a problem has resulted in an outage. In these situations, the impetus among engineers can be to get the system up again, no matter what the problem is.

You might discover, during your troubleshooting steps, that /var/log has filled up, and has taken the rest of the disk with it. In these situations, it can be incredibly tempting to simply delete the offending log file(s) and restart the broken daemon.

You should do that, but not right away. First, you need to make sure you've got the file for later consumption so that the problem doesn't happen again.