Generating crash reports with abrt

CentOS includes Red Hat's automatic bug reporting tool (ABRT) which should catch programs and services crashing due to a segmentation violation.

This is very useful for instance for reporting bugs to Red Hat.

However, it needs a bit of configuration before it can be used.

Normally our systems have a limit on the core dump size.

Install the abrt-addon-ccpp package and run

/usr/sbin/abrt-install-ccpp-hook install

This will update /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern to be

|/usr/libexec/abrt-hook-ccpp %s %c %p %u %g %t e

The core dumps will be written to /var/spool/abrt.

See also CentOS Tips and Tricks on ABRT.