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Terra did not lauch on the 16th; I was in an auditorium at Goddard (I'm contracting at TRW on EDOS, the EOS Data and Operations System) watching the launch attempt on Thursday. They had to delay to get a glider out of the airspace (!), then the lauch was cancelled at the last minute; I think they failed to get an expected signal from the spacecraft indicting it was powered up. Whole bunch of disappointed people, let me tell you.

They rescheduled to Saturday (the 18th), and apparently it's up.

Terra is the first of the EOS satellites, with several instruments designed to gather information about global climate change (global warming, pollution, cloud cover, and so o.) and large-scale weather patterns. It's the satellite formerly known as AM-1, "AM" because it's in a polar sun-synchronous orbit that crosses the equator in the morning when conditions over land are clearest. Next to lauch will be Aqua (nee PM-1), which crosses in the afternoon for observations over water.

I know I feel all warm and fuzzy after seeing their spiffy animations.

What I wonder: How do they keep the cartoonist from burning up on reentry?... :-)

One of the Goddard sites has the news if you need to see it to believe it.

...Terra, the EOS flag ship, is detailed very well on Nasa site. It goes up today on a Atlas rocket, and they have some VRML models of the spacecraft. The instrument array on board(~130k) is very impressive, not to mention the earth images page tht will soon be displaying the result of the mission.
I hope you all find this information informative and useful.

_____________________________________

...Terra, the EOS flag ship, is detailed very well on Nasa site. It goes up today on a Atlas rocket, and they have some VRML models of the spacecraft. The instrument array on board(~130k) is very impressive, not to mention the earth images page tht will soon be displaying the result of the mission.
I hope you all find this information informative and useful.

_____________________________________

...Terra, the EOS flag ship, is detailed very well on Nasa site. It goes up today on a Atlas rocket, and they have some VRML models of the spacecraft. The instrument array on board(~130k) is very impressive, not to mention the earth images page tht will soon be displaying the result of the mission.
I hope you all find this information informative and useful.

_____________________________________

That picture encouraged me to find more, NASA has a huge number of shots posted from the Galileo flyby of Europa:

http://www-pdsimage.jpl.nasa. gov/cgi-bin/Nav/GLL_search.pl

You can search by target (Europa) and also by orbit, there's a page that describes the different orbits and how far away from Europa they were.

Also, I found a page that has a clickable map of Europa where you can zoom in on certain areas they took photographs of (at low, medium, and high resolution) and see data about the region and captions about the image. It's absolutely fascinating...

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov /galileo/europa/clickmap/europa.html

Also, this last link might be a tad off-topic, but it's NASA's Planetary Photojournal, they have images from all the planets, and you can search by target and mission to get specifc images or look at all the images for a specific target. It found 100 photos of Europa when I searched...

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/

One last link, then I'll shut up... This one is the Planetary Image Archive, it lists different missions (Galileo, Viking, Pathfinder) and gives links to pictures or search engines for those missions. It's not as friendly as the photojournal above, but it seems to have more data:

http://www-pdsimage.jp l.nasa.gov/PDS/public/Atlas/Atlas.html

Doug

That picture encouraged me to find more, NASA has a huge number of shots posted from the Galileo flyby of Europa:

http://www-pdsimage.jpl.nasa. gov/cgi-bin/Nav/GLL_search.pl

You can search by target (Europa) and also by orbit, there's a page that describes the different orbits and how far away from Europa they were.

Also, I found a page that has a clickable map of Europa where you can zoom in on certain areas they took photographs of (at low, medium, and high resolution) and see data about the region and captions about the image. It's absolutely fascinating...

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov /galileo/europa/clickmap/europa.html

Also, this last link might be a tad off-topic, but it's NASA's Planetary Photojournal, they have images from all the planets, and you can search by target and mission to get specifc images or look at all the images for a specific target. It found 100 photos of Europa when I searched...

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/

One last link, then I'll shut up... This one is the Planetary Image Archive, it lists different missions (Galileo, Viking, Pathfinder) and gives links to pictures or search engines for those missions. It's not as friendly as the photojournal above, but it seems to have more data:

http://www-pdsimage.jp l.nasa.gov/PDS/public/Atlas/Atlas.html

Doug

That picture encouraged me to find more, NASA has a huge number of shots posted from the Galileo flyby of Europa:

http://www-pdsimage.jpl.nasa. gov/cgi-bin/Nav/GLL_search.pl

You can search by target (Europa) and also by orbit, there's a page that describes the different orbits and how far away from Europa they were.

Also, I found a page that has a clickable map of Europa where you can zoom in on certain areas they took photographs of (at low, medium, and high resolution) and see data about the region and captions about the image. It's absolutely fascinating...

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov /galileo/europa/clickmap/europa.html

Also, this last link might be a tad off-topic, but it's NASA's Planetary Photojournal, they have images from all the planets, and you can search by target and mission to get specifc images or look at all the images for a specific target. It found 100 photos of Europa when I searched...

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/

One last link, then I'll shut up... This one is the Planetary Image Archive, it lists different missions (Galileo, Viking, Pathfinder) and gives links to pictures or search engines for those missions. It's not as friendly as the photojournal above, but it seems to have more data:

http://www-pdsimage.jp l.nasa.gov/PDS/public/Atlas/Atlas.html

Doug

That picture encouraged me to find more, NASA has a huge number of shots posted from the Galileo flyby of Europa:

http://www-pdsimage.jpl.nasa. gov/cgi-bin/Nav/GLL_search.pl

You can search by target (Europa) and also by orbit, there's a page that describes the different orbits and how far away from Europa they were.

Also, I found a page that has a clickable map of Europa where you can zoom in on certain areas they took photographs of (at low, medium, and high resolution) and see data about the region and captions about the image. It's absolutely fascinating...

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov /galileo/europa/clickmap/europa.html

Also, this last link might be a tad off-topic, but it's NASA's Planetary Photojournal, they have images from all the planets, and you can search by target and mission to get specifc images or look at all the images for a specific target. It found 100 photos of Europa when I searched...

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/

One last link, then I'll shut up... This one is the Planetary Image Archive, it lists different missions (Galileo, Viking, Pathfinder) and gives links to pictures or search engines for those missions. It's not as friendly as the photojournal above, but it seems to have more data:

http://www-pdsimage.jp l.nasa.gov/PDS/public/Atlas/Atlas.html

Doug

NASA has an article about the bacteria they found on the Surveyor 3 camera brought back by the Apollo 12 astronauts.

Europa does indeed look like the most likely spot for life in the solar system, and even if there is no native life, it's quite possible that introduced microbes could thrive there. (although the ethics of such an act are questionable).

the story is here

A politician couldn't use this as a justification to cut funding and not look ignorant. It just happens to be a high-profile mission. The [inter]national media usually ignores 98% of the wide variety of science that NASA does (like tons of aircraft research, some artificial organ research, and, oh, funding some linux development efforts).

Not that NASA's budget has been safe from cuts... just this year congress almost cut like $1.1 billion from it (total budget is around $14 billion. The polar lander mission cost $156 million). The budget hasn't been increased for years, despite the national surplus and all the cuts in defense spending awhile back.

Also, back on topic, I wanted to mention, the media keeps reporting 'The lander is still silent'... well, of course its still silent, it hasn't had an opportunity to communicate since last night! They might as well keep reporting 'its not Christmas yet!' for all the news that is...

If there's no water on Mars, and colonization is the prime goal of our exploration there, then we might as well colonize the moon first. Cheaper, closer, and all the alumninum we want.

What makes the exploration of Mars so interesting is that we don't know that there aren't actually large quantities of water there. We should really know definitively that there is no appreciable water supply there before we discount it as a possible colonization sight.

Aside from colonization, which is one hundred years away at best, there are a multitude of scientifically interesting reasons to explore Mars.

1) What caused the climate of Mars to change? Is Earth in danger of a similar change, and can we be taking steps to prevent that?

2) Did primitive life exist on Mars, and if so, how does it compare to primitive life on Earth?

3) Are there natural resources on Mars worth mining and returning to Earth?

Basically, learning about Mars gives us something to compare our study of Earth against, and may give us a source of resources (and real estate) to help us overcome our rapid depletion of Earth's resources.

Here is a page at JPL about what starts to happen since the signal is not being heard.

They are still trying to contact the lander on X-Band, but there is still a UHF radio on board and there is still the matter of redundant radios, plus the little matter that the lander will start swapping out it's own components after six days of not getting commands from Earth. There is still a long way to go before one can start being worried.

If everyone submits the story, they might get impression that we want it on slashdot.

I submitted it and had it rejected.

Other links regarding the MIA probe include:
The Official Mars Polar Lander Website
CBC's coverage (with two different video feeds... I love broadband)

The US has a law thats purpose is to stop companies from over charging on government deals. Basically it says when you do business with the government, the most profit you can make on is 25%. If your costs go down and you don't rebate the government, then you can loose big time. There used to be a warning about this on the NASA SBIR program page but I can't find it in the current docs (the old ones are on line and searchable as well). If this law applies to licenses (which I think it does), then it looks like out of this 7.5mil, about 5.625mil should go back to the NSF.

6.Does Linux have anything like the one time use password system?

No.

Actually, you're wrong. Check out OPIE

• Beowulf is one of a family of parallel programming API tools. Programs must use the API to accomplish parallel programming.
• SCI is fast hardware with support for distributed shared memory, messaging, and data transfers. Again, if you don't use the API then no gain.
• DIPC is distributed System V IPC. Programs which use the IPC API can be converted to DIPC easily, such as just by adding the DIPC flag to the IPC call.
• MOSIX is the most general-purpose. Processes are scattered across a cluster automatically without having to modify the programs. No API needed other than usual Unix-level process use. Allows parallel execution of any program, although full use requires a parallel program design.

Check out http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds2/tech/tech.ht ml for more tech details.

Check out the DS2 mission flipbook.

Do you think we should have a Linux installation flipbook???

-JT

From their mission page - http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds2/missio n/mission.html

"On impact, each shell will shatter, and its grapefruit-sized probe will punch through the soil and separate into two parts. The lower part, called the forebody, will penetrate as far as 0.6 meters (about 2 feet) into the soil; the upper part of the probe, or the aftbody, will stay on the surface to radio data to the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, currently in orbit around Mars, which will then send the data to Earth."

NASA's "Mars Polar Lander" touches down this Friday (December 3) at 3:37 pm EST. Shortly before that it'll be releasing the two "Deep Space 2" probes to bury deeper into Mars' surface - both will be looking for water and organics, signs of life, and in the most promising part of Mars yet - the south polar area. Newsweek has an excellent cover story on this this week (by Sharon Begley, whose science reporting I greatly respect). Aside from Europa, Mars really is the mostly likely place for life in our solar system. Perhaps more likely than Europa given that Mars clearly had a liquid water ocean early in its history. The next few years should be VERY interesting in the search for extraterrestrial life!

In addition to the discovery of six new planets, the researchers gathered new data on four known planets, whose orbits they had previously studied. Two of them showed long-term trends in their orbits indicating the presence of a companion, which could be an additional planet. These findings are significant because previously only one other system of multiple planets, around the star Upsilon Andromedae, had been identified outside our solar system.

This is so new to us, I don't think i've really seen any work on star study to determine if there are longer period planets. For instance, the one confirmed via the brightness method two weeks back had a period of 3.3 days. Put in their local terms, one of their YEARS is 3.3 of our DAYS. To accurately get something with a period on the order of one of our years or more, a longer study period is needed. (this isn't quite true according to nyquist, but increased samples give increased accuracy) Try getting all that telescope time if you're a lowly grad student with no nearby observatory and meager funding! (especially Keck!)

You can see the NASA press release regarding this at ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pa o/pressrel/1999/99-140.txt

[humour]Maybe we can all hook up our old satellite tv dishes like Charlie Sheen and have a big distributed star observing effort in a radio telescope version of the SETI stuff! ;-)[/humour]

• The Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics (CAAO) at the University of Arizona
• NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF)

• The Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics (CAAO) at the University of Arizona
• NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF)

• NASA Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards
• Torino Impact Hazard Scale

• NASA Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards
• Torino Impact Hazard Scale

Finally, governments that might actually, maybe, get it :). It strikes me that this is something that the United Nations should fund, as the implications and benefits of any work into researching Near Earth Objects. JPL is associated with some work into this: Check out the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program (NEAT).

Some people think of this as a waste of money, but we are the first species to get to the point where we can prevent our own (eventual) cosmic reset button from being set.

One way to look at it is a great big life insurance program for Human Civilization - the payments aren't high, the work can be largely automated, and if the program ever pays off, there is no way to measure the value of the endeavor! :)

Too bad the US wouldn't shovel some more bucks into NEAT, but, we'll see what international competition can do.

Kudos..

Read more: at Lockheed Martin, about Silent Sentry, about a shuttle launch and about information dating back over a year - this all comes very sudden and suprising to the US defense, completely new and previously unknown technology.

© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp

• To prevent broaching. Subs are designed to be a tiny bit boyant. That's why when they move normally at a constant depth the diving planes are at a slight down angle (usually a degree or two). If the sub stops moving, she can no longer totally control her depth. That's a Bad Thing ©
• Steerage. Almost the same problem as above. Any good skipper will try to go no slower than 2 or 3 knots. That way, the boat will still be responsive to steering input. Why? beacause...
• Sonar equipment only works in cones or echelons. Problem: you cannot cover the entire 360 degrees around a boat with one passive sonar. Solution: have multiple passive sonars. Most boats have a front array, lateral array, and some (I know the Los Angeles boats do) have towed arrays. For those to work, the boat needs to be able to move the arrays around (purposes of triangulation and all).

This sounds like a different satellite, but the same general idea.

[...]So NASA's engineers flew the satellite past that point five times, emitting carefully calculated but very tiny squirts of precious hydrazine on each flyby, and persuaded the nearly defunct ISEE-3 to become the vibrant and exciting ICE, the International Cometary Explorer.[...]

Links here and here.

Yup. The whole voyager project was that way. The voyager programmers and engineers deserve a big trophy for that!

"Let's take advantage of the trip to collect data on something else, like 2 other planet flybys" and then they upload new machine code to do more.... They hacked maximum useage out of those little buggers, and they did it from such a great distance. And they're still going!
JPL link
--willydog

Yes, this is slighly off-topic, but Slashdot won't let me start a new main thread, and this is a space-related hack.

Once upon the time, the military decided it would be really great to know exactly where you were anywhere in the world, say by just pressing a button on a hand-held unit. The geeks in the backroom found out a way to do this, using satellites (this alone was quite a hack, actually...) Now, lo and behold, we can all use GPS to find out exactly where we are.

Well, not exactly. The military realized it would not be a great idea to let just anybody have such nice positioning information. It would suck if Saddam Hussein knew exactly where all his tanks were during a battle, too. So the GPS system also has a built-in method to screw up the signal to a greater or lesser extent depending on who you are and whether or not we're fighting a war.

Now comes the real hack: a bunch of geeky geoscientists (or is that redundant?) decided that they could track tectonic plate movements using GPS...if only they could obtain more accuracy than the generals would be comfortable with. So what they did was design a method that all but ignored the "for the public" tracking information you could get from the GPS system, and instead focused on analyzing the inevitable phase distortions of the carrier frequency itself to achieve better than 1 cm location accuracy, after lots of post-processing. A crude analogy here would be to come up with a system that would do something useful with TCP/IP packets by ignoring the "useful" contents of the packets themselves, but concentrating on the quirky bits (like the TCP finger-printing people) or the weird statistics of packet arrival times.

None of this is exactly what the military had in mind, but this is (so far) only useful for surveying applications, an most notably the study and identification of known and unknown faults in tectoncially active regions of the world. You can look at some of the more recent data at this JPL site put together by Michael Heflin. The next time somebody asks you how we know that plate tectonics really works, just send them here. :-)

...someone had to give at least one:

The SR-71 Blackbird. It may not be a "classical" hack, 'coz Lockheed's Skunk Works had an unlimited budget to throw at the problem, but considering the technology at the time, it kicked some ass... Some stats, for the non-plane freaks out there:
* Total time it took to design it and built a prototype: 6 (or maybe 8?) months. There are software programs out there that took a lot longer than that ;-)
* It still (~40 years later) holds the title for the fastest *production* aircraft out there (err... at least non-classified ;-) Mach 3.62 is nothing to sneeze at...

If you don't dare consider an airplane (i.e. a complete system) as a hack, consider the following:
* The damn thing was almost entirely built of titanium alloy --only material available back then that could handle the temperatures involved. Problem: noone before was able to machine titanium. The Lockheed guys built an entire machine shop from scratch.
* Titanium, as any metal, expands when heated: the planes had to have 'seams' in the wings that were closed when the sheetmetal expanded: the SR-71 leaked fuel (120 octane fuel) while parked on the runway!
* The Pratt&Whitney (I think) folks had to come up with an engine that could change modes of operation in mid-flight: they made the first and only combination turbojet-ramjet engine. The Lockheed people had to make them work at any angle of attack. Yeah, it's esoteric, but the implementation is a tour-de-force to this day.
* The poor Russians had no way to intercept these aircraft although they knew they were flying overhead and photgraphing everything (at Mach 3.62 the SR-71 could outrun any rocket or bullet at the time, and I it still can). So they build the all-steel Mig 29 (another great aircraft). But the -29 was too damn heavy to fly as high as the titanium-only -71, so the Soviets flew formations of -29s *under* the -71 to obstruct its camera's view...

I highly reccommend the excellent "Skunk Works" book to anyone impressed by this... I just don't think most of the /.ers will care ;-(...

I guess I have to put in a computer hack as well. Hmmm... : FSP (yeah, that's an 'S').

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

We don't know for a fact where the chineese got this technology. It's quite possible that they developed it themselves. In the past few years, they have shown great desire to catch up in the technological world. They've been working on programs to use the internet, stealing secret technologies from us, and while we sit here making jokes about them and the bum in the whitehouse our own space agency if working on a plan to send our children's names to Mars(http://spacekids.hq.nasa.gov/2001/). How cute!

Why did we win the Gulf War? We were so far advanced from the Iraquis that they didn't stand a chance. That was when we realized we have to stay ahead(or at least some of us did). I would say that we should keep this advantage. Hopefully now that we have a little competition, our own ingenuity will kick in and start cranking out some cool new stuff.

Anyway, back to China...They're becomming a bigger threat to us now that they can send manned missions into space (don't ask me how, that just sounded good). We need to stop lolly-gagging around in the China-policy area, and stop ingoring everything they do against us and create a policy to keep them in check. My two cents :-)

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day features a nice animation of a Leonid exploding over Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1998.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day features a nice animation of a Leonid exploding over Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1998.

Damn, I submited this tuesday and it has been rejected... Seems like Jamie stoole my post ;-) anyways, here is a link to a Java applet that can estimate your peek view: http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html

I think I've found the original logo.

--Matt

Hubble sat around for a few extra years and had plenty of time to age. The whole problem with the optics on Hubble was that sitting on earth too long deformed the mirror.

Nope. Although the HST primary mirror was ground perfectly to shape, it was unfortunately the wrong shape. Nothing to do with the HST's (admittedly) rather long stay in the clean room. You can read about the corrective optics package that NASA put together to fix the problem (called COSTAR) here.

Hubble is about 15 years old.

Older. The design concept work, which for something your sending up on a man rated booster sets the design in stone, was done in pre-1977.

It was one of the first (if not the first) satellites designed to be maintained by the shuttle.

Unless they've done some military stuff that I'm not aware of, its the only one. No one else was dumb enough to do it again...

Not sure about the lifespan.

Final servicing mission is due for 2003, after that HST lasts as long as it lasts. Some satellites last well beyond they're design specs. For instance the ESA IUE satellite was designed with an expected lifetime was three years, in the end it lasted eighteen years. Finally being shutdown on September of 1996. By late March of 1996 the satellite was operating on just one of its original six gyros (and no HST can't do that!).

The HST will be replaced, at least on the NASA side of the fence, by the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) due to be lauched some time in 2008.

Some people might like their bloated word processors, but I'll stick with raw LaTeX, thanks. Doesn't suck down all my memory and I invariably get better output than that of any GUI word processor I've ever seen.

Somewhat offtopic: I recently started using LyX, basically a WYSIWYG front-end to LaTeX that's actually pretty cool. I find it nice when creating documents containing lots of greek to actually see what the formulas are going to look like. It even supports macros (though only in math mode). Plus, it's open source! I used it to write a conference paper submission and found it way smoother than hacking the raw LaTeX. Not everything is as intuitive as one might hope -- I had a few points of confusion early on, mainly because I didn't RTFM, but the developers were quite helpful and set me straight.

Granted, LyX still has some stability problems (i.e. it randomly dumps core) but since it makes emacs-stlye emergency backups, in addition to creating recovery files just before giving up the ghost, I've never lost a single keystroke of data, unlike some other word processors I've used.

This is the LISA project, which hopes to launch in 2008: see NASA's LISA homepage.

I don't recall seeing it here, but NASA gave it a mention on their rather spiffing web site. If you haven't subscribed to their daily bulletins, do so now.

I am preparing a web page showing my homebuilt tesla coil. You will be able to find it at http://cml.grc.nasa.gov/~chuck/tesla.html , but it's not finished just yet. I hate to do this, but I have to boot into Win95 in order to use my Snappy video capture (I already complained to http://www.play.com about not having a Linux driver, but it did no good and I'm too cheap to run out and buy a real video capture board). I'll put up some pictures showing my setup along with a quick and dirty explanation. By today's tesla coil standards, this is about the simplest and crudest design possible, but it does work. I know there are much better designs out there, so if you want more sophisticated stuff, do a google search.

And indeed they've taken your suggestion. Donald Becker is on the list.

Yes, every reasonable operating system can be configured to save the core files resultant from a kernel panic to swap, and yes, many provide excellent tools for conducting a post-mortem analysis of the image to diagnose what caused it to croak. But in the past, with the notable exception of IRIX, this process required a fairly intimate knowledge of the operating system and even the underlying hardware, and was considered something of a black art. An excellent book on core dump analysis issues/procedures is 'PANIC!' Unix System Crash Dump Analysis, published by Sunsoft. IRIX, and now Linux when properly configured, automatically conducts the crash dump analysis upon re-entering multi-user, saving a legible and comprehensible report detailing what was going on at the time of the crash and providing a suggestion as to the cause.

This facility can be an excellent way of quickly tracking down the cause of the panic, or at least determining if the problem lay in hardware or software. Below are three examples of some recent reports generated at our site:

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

While this utility is no replacement for an experienced sysadmin and a debugger when it comes to deciphering the cause of failure in complex systems (especially SMP), it will likely be a boon to the hundreds of thousands of Linux admins supporting small workgroup servers and workstations. And yes, Linux is stable.. but c'mon: kernels panic.

Yes, every reasonable operating system can be configured to save the core files resultant from a kernel panic to swap, and yes, many provide excellent tools for conducting a post-mortem analysis of the image to diagnose what caused it to croak. But in the past, with the notable exception of IRIX, this process required a fairly intimate knowledge of the operating system and even the underlying hardware, and was considered something of a black art. An excellent book on core dump analysis issues/procedures is 'PANIC!' Unix System Crash Dump Analysis, published by Sunsoft. IRIX, and now Linux when properly configured, automatically conducts the crash dump analysis upon re-entering multi-user, saving a legible and comprehensible report detailing what was going on at the time of the crash and providing a suggestion as to the cause.

This facility can be an excellent way of quickly tracking down the cause of the panic, or at least determining if the problem lay in hardware or software. Below are three examples of some recent reports generated at our site:

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

While this utility is no replacement for an experienced sysadmin and a debugger when it comes to deciphering the cause of failure in complex systems (especially SMP), it will likely be a boon to the hundreds of thousands of Linux admins supporting small workgroup servers and workstations. And yes, Linux is stable.. but c'mon: kernels panic.

Yes, every reasonable operating system can be configured to save the core files resultant from a kernel panic to swap, and yes, many provide excellent tools for conducting a post-mortem analysis of the image to diagnose what caused it to croak. But in the past, with the notable exception of IRIX, this process required a fairly intimate knowledge of the operating system and even the underlying hardware, and was considered something of a black art. An excellent book on core dump analysis issues/procedures is 'PANIC!' Unix System Crash Dump Analysis, published by Sunsoft. IRIX, and now Linux when properly configured, automatically conducts the crash dump analysis upon re-entering multi-user, saving a legible and comprehensible report detailing what was going on at the time of the crash and providing a suggestion as to the cause.

This facility can be an excellent way of quickly tracking down the cause of the panic, or at least determining if the problem lay in hardware or software. Below are three examples of some recent reports generated at our site:

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

While this utility is no replacement for an experienced sysadmin and a debugger when it comes to deciphering the cause of failure in complex systems (especially SMP), it will likely be a boon to the hundreds of thousands of Linux admins supporting small workgroup servers and workstations. And yes, Linux is stable.. but c'mon: kernels panic.