netconsole service

netconsole is a Linux kernel module that sends all kernel log messages over the network to another computer. It was designed to be as instantaneous as possible, to enable the logging of even the most critical kernel bugs. It works from IRQ contexts as well, and does not enable interrupts while sending packets. Due to these unique needs, only IP networks, UDP packets and Ethernet devices are supported. More information can be found in networking/netconsole.txt of the Linux kernel documentation.

This project provides a netconsole service that dynamically configures netconsole by configuring one or more hosts by their names or IP addresses.

netconsole-setup eases the configuration of the netconsole by just taking the target hostname or IP address. It determines all the needed configuration values from the running network device (like network interface, target IP and MAC address). Multiple target hosts can be specified. Each host can be prefixed with a target port and a plus sign to enable extended console support.

Examples

netconsole-setup loghost

sends all kernel log messages to host loghost.

netconsole-setup +4444@loghost

sends all kernel log messages to host loghost on port 4444 using the extended console support.

netconsole-setup loghost1 4444@loghost2

sends all kernel log messages to host loghost1 on the default port and to host loghost2 on port 4444.

Alternatives

The initscripts package on CentOS 7 provides a /etc/init.d/netconsole initscript that can configure netconsole by just configuring SYSLOGADDR. The functionality is similar, but this project provides also a systemd service and allows to specify multiple log hosts.

Dependencies

Following commands need to be available for netconsole-setup:

• arping either from Thomas Habet or from the iputils project (provided by the iputils-arping package on Debian-based systems)
• ip from the iproute2 project
• modprobe (provided by the kmod package on Debian-based systems)
• mount

pandoc is required for generating the man page for netconsole-setup.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please follow How to Write a Git Commit Message for writing good commit messages.

Creating releases

To create a release, increase the version in Makefile, document the noteworthy changes in NEWS, and commit and tag the release:

git commit -s -m "Release netconsole $(make version)" Makefile NEWS
git tag "$(make version)"

The xz-compressed release tarball can be generated by running:

make dist