"Recently I inheritted ownership of an SVN server which was misbehaving. Trying to determine why it wasn't working correctly involved a few hours of testing, careful thought, and caffeine. Eventually I got it working correctly using the often-overlooked tool strace. strace is a common tool upon many GNU/Linux systems including Debian. Put simply strace is a 'system call tracer' - which is where it gets its name from. Using strace, as root, you can monitor the system calls made by any process upon your system. This can be enormously beneficial when you have a misbehaving program."
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Member since:
2005-07-09
Member since:
2006-01-10
This puzzled me a bit : "...the often-overlooked tool strace...".
Where I come from (Sysadmin at an ISP), 'strace' and 'ltrace' are quite commonly used debug tools, and when speaking with coworkers and other people at trade-shows etc I get the impression that their use as troubleshooting tools is rather common...
Ohh well...
Member since:
2006-02-17
the best stuff i ever seen is snoopdos on amiga.
here thake a look:
http://yggdrasil.keisangi.free.fr/snoopdos.jpg
http://yggdrasil.keisangi.free.fr/snoopdos.log
both a picture showing how it looks, and a log.
with snoopdos i can see what the whole system is doing.
when i launch an new app i want to test,
if it doesn't work , i can see:
if app is missing some of it's files,
or if my system lack some libs to run this app
i can see everything.. missing gfx res.
missing font.
when some program just don't behave correctly,
snoopdos is the ultimate weapon 
i never saw such a thing elsewhere.
strace output looks so bad..
it isn't clear at all.
frankly i like the linux movment, the philosophy behind gnu/gpl but, it lacks such a tool.
and additionaly, snoopdos is customisable:
http://yggdrasil.keisangi.free.fr/snoopdos2.jpg
i would dream of such clarity in linux world.
Member since:2005-07-06
Perhaps you want systemtap and frysk?
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
http://sourceware.org/frysk/
Provides as part of RHEL 4 in updates and in FC5.
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:
2006-02-17
thanks for the links, and information.
i tryed to find a screenshot for those two apps frysk and systemtap.
i could find some ab›for frysk
i wasn't able to find any for systemtap
but i don't see where thoses two apps do something similar to snoopdos.
again the output seems unreadable,
it's gaz factory.
i think ppl need something simple and efficient.
just what snoopdos is.
even a braindead moron could use snoopdos and understand it's output very clearly.
like: i try to load an app, say an irc client.
if it doesn't load or work properly a quick look at snoopdos will show thing like that:
------
open app "apps/internet/irc/myirc.exe" result: ok
open font "system/fonts/blah.font" ....result: fail
--------
(so you see it couldn't find it's font)
or again:
--------
open app "apps/internet/irc/myirc.exe" result: ok
open lib "system/libs/guitoolkitX.lib" result: fail
--------
(so it couldn't find guitoolkitX.lib, so myirc.exe couldn't be loaded in the end)
it's clear, simple and powerful.
maybe i missed something?
i'll give a try to thoses apps anyway (frysk and systap) but from what i saw, it's completly diffrent than snoopdos.
