This documentation supports the 21.05 (12.2) version of BMC Discovery.To view an earlier version of the product, select the version from the Product version menu.

Troubleshooting core dump files

When you observe large-sized core dump files running into several GBs in the folder location /usr/tideway/cores, use the troubleshooting steps described in this section to either resolve the problem or create a BMC Support case.

Issue symptoms

The following symptoms are observed for the core dump files:

  • The folder /usr/tideway/cores is not empty but contains one or more large-sized core dump files. For example, you may observe the following files:
    • /usr/tideway/cores/core.2278
    • /usr/tideway/cores/core_2278.txt
    • /usr/tideway/cores/core_2278.gz
  • You may detect a crash or a system restart matching the core dump creation date.
  • The core file size may be greater than 10 GB. This saturates the /usr partition and stops the appliance from restarting. 

Scope

This issue impacts all versions of BMC Discovery, irrespective of whether clusters and multi-generational databases exist or not.

Resolution

Perform the following steps to resolve the issue of large-sized core dump files:

  1. Open an SSH session as the tideway user and run the tw_check_cores command.
    This command is automatically executed every hour, and it zips and analyzes the cores. This action may free the disk space at the first run itself.

  2. Perform the steps documented in the BMC Community article titled, Discovery: How to check if the datastore is corrupted?
    If you can fix the issue by following the instructions, then ignore the following steps. Otherwise, continue with the following steps.

  3. Open a BMC Support case and do the following:
    1. (If possible) Do not delete anything in the folder /usr/tideway/cores/ until you know the root cause. If the UI is unavailable because the /usr folder is full, try to back up at least the two most recent *.gz and *.txt files to another location.
    2. Attach the file db_verifyResultFile.txt (one per member) generated at the end of step 2 to the Support case.
    3. Attach the files /usr/tideway/cores/*.txt. These txt files are small in size. You can either email them or attach them to the Support case.

    4. Refer to the BMC Community article and perform the steps listed in it on the member where you found the core dump. Attach the resulting .tgz file to the Support case. 

    5. (If possible) Send one core file to BMC Support through mft.bmc.com. The most recent one is usually truncated, so prioritize the one that was dumped just before the truncation. Core files can be more than 10 GB in size, so make sure that they have a .gz extension.