Panic mail is a great utility to capture kernel panics and report them to the FreeBSD developer community. Although I rarely receive a kernel panic running standard release installations of FreeBSD, it is installed on all my production servers. We owe many thanks to Colin Percival for this utility.
Let’s get started:
# portsnap fetch update # cd /usr/ports/sysutils/panicmail # make install clean
The following installation notes appear after compiling panic mail:
===> Installing for panicmail-1.0
===> Checking if sysutils/panicmail already installed
To enable sending of panic reports, add
dumpdev="AUTO"
panicmail_enable="YES"
to your /etc/rc.conf.
By default panic reports will be sent to root with instructions
to forward them if they do not contain any sensitive information.
To automatically submit panic reports directly, add
panicmail_autosubmit="YES"
to your /etc/rc.conf in addition.
To complete the configuration of panic mail, just follow the installation notes above and add the following to your rc.conf:
dumpdev="AUTO" panicmail_enable="YES" panicmail_autosubmit="YES"
Hope you find this utility a useful addition to your toolbox. For more information, please visit Colin’s Blog at http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-11-06-automated-freebsd-panic-reporting.html.