Command to output panic/reboot history in FreeBSD

Question

Many years ago while dealing with a FreeBSD (5.3?) box that randomly panic'ed and reboot (bad memory as it turned out), I came across a command in some forum post that when used would output information about previous reboots including the panic message. It allowed me to look back and see how often the issue was happening. I should have made note of it, I guess I relied too much on history to remember it.

It was an obscure (at least to me) command with a few args. It wasn't something I had to install via ports. I assume it relied on logs or dumps to collect the information. I think the output was formatted in two 40 character columns with most of the information in the first column. I think the panic message was part of the second column.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Answer 1

If you have dumps turned on, there is some reasonably useful information about the crashes you've had in /var/crash - specifically the info.* files - this includes the dump time and the kernel panic string.

You can also use the crash dump (vmdump.*) with kgdb(1) to do more detailed debugging on these crashes.

Answer 2

The only command that i can recall is last. It's output looks like this:

> last
savetherbtz      ttyp7    ph34r.ru         Wed Aug 19 13:18   still logged in
reboot           ~                         Sat Aug 15 17:38
savetherbtz      ttyp0    192.168.0.111    Sat Aug 15 04:34 - crash  (13:03)
reboot           ~                         Sat Aug 15 04:32
savetherbtz      ttyp0    192.168.0.111    Fri Aug 14 21:07 - crash  (07:24)

If crashdumps were enabled you can also format output of ls -al in /var/crash directory

And as last resort you can see recent panics using command cat /var/log/messages | grep panic ;; bzcat /var/log/messages.?.bz2 | grep panic

Answer 3

Was it ksymoops? It translates the oops files into human readable.