Apport for servers?

[Soren Hansen]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 05:24:25PM +0000, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> I like to install and enable apport on my servers, so that if a daemon
> crashes, it leaves behind a crash file with the relevant state which I
> can use for analysis and reporting the bug.
> 
> I think this functionality should continue to be disabled by defaul in
> stable releases, but what do you think about including apport in the
> server install so that 1) we get the benefits of crash reporting for
> pre-release development, and 2) administrators can trivially enable
> it?

It seems perfectly reasonable to me. Apport already has an understanding
of "system users":

    $ /usr/share/apport/apport-checkreports -h
    Usage: apport-checkreports [options]
    
    Options:
      -h, --help    show this help message and exit
      -s, --system  Check for crash reports from system users.

It applies the LSB interpretation of "system user" (uid < 500) rather
than the Debian ditto (uid < 1000), though, but that's a minor detail.

For notifications, apport's README.Debian suggests a .bashrc snippet,
but I think we should consider some or all of:

 * Attempt to send an e-mail to the root user about the crash.
 * Have landscape-sysinfo tell about it.
 * Add a Nagios plugin to warn about it. 

-- 
Soren Hansen               | 
Virtualisation specialist  | Ubuntu Server Team
Canonical Ltd.             | http://www.ubuntu.com/
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