28.5. Configuring Centralized Crash Collection
You can set up ABRT so that crash reports are collected from multiple systems and sent to a dedicated system for further processing. This is useful when an administrator does not want to log into hundreds of systems and manually check for crashes found by ABRT. In order to use this method, you need to install the libreport-plugin-reportuploader plug-in (
yum install libreport-plugin-reportuploader). See the following sections on how to configure systems to use ABRT's centralized crash collection.
28.5.1. Configuration Steps Required on a Dedicated System
Complete the following steps on a dedicated (server) system:
- Create a directory to which you want the crash reports to be uploaded to. Usually,
/var/spool/abrt-upload/is used (the rest of the document assumes you are using this directory). Make sure this directory is writable by the abrt user.Note
When the abrt-desktop package is installed, it creates a new system user and a group, both namedabrt. This user is used by theabrtddaemon, for example, as the owner:group of/var/spool/abrt/*directories. - In the
/etc/abrt/abrt.confconfiguration file, set theWatchCrashdumpArchiveDirdirective to the following:WatchCrashdumpArchiveDir = /var/spool/abrt-upload/
- Choose your preferred upload mechanism; for example,
FTPorSCP. For more information on how to configureFTP, see Section 21.2, “FTP”. For more information on how to configureSCP, see Section 14.4.2, “Using thescpUtility”.It is advisable to check whether your upload method works. For example, if you useFTP, upload a file using an interactiveFTPclient:~]$
ftpftp>open servernameName:usernamePassword:passwordftp>cd /var/spool/abrt-upload250 Operation successful ftp>put testfileftp>quitCheck whethertestfileappeared in the correct directory on the server system. - The
MaxCrashReportsSizedirective (in the/etc/abrt/abrt.confconfiguration file) needs to be set to a larger value if the expected volume of crash data is larger than the default1000MB. - Consider whether you would like to generate a backtrace of C/C++ crashes.You can disable backtrace generation on the server if you do not want to generate backtraces at all, or if you decide to create them locally on the machine where a problem occurred. In the standard ABRT installation, a backtrace of a C/C++ crash is generated using the following rule in the
/etc/libreport/events.d/ccpp_events.confconfiguration file:EVENT=analyze_LocalGDB analyzer=CCpp abrt-action-analyze-core.py --core=coredump -o build_ids && abrt-action-install-debuginfo-to-abrt-cache --size_mb=4096 && abrt-action-generate-backtrace && abrt-action-analyze-backtraceYou can ensure that this rule is not applied for uploaded problem data by adding theremote!=1condition to the rule. - Decide whether you want to collect package information (the
packageand thecomponentelements) in the problem data. See Section 28.5.3, “Saving Package Information” to find out whether you need to collect package information in your centralized crash collection configuration and how to configure it properly.
