Our server had panic and don’t have any space left on you /var partition, worry no more, there is still a way to generate the core files with the help of savecore and make Sun Support don’t wait for another panic to happen before they get their core files.

From the man pages of savecore(1M):

The savecore utility  saves  a  crash  dump  of  the  kernel (assuming 
that one was made) and writes a reboot message in the shutdown log. It is
invoked by the dumpadm service  each time the system boots.

Check the /var/adm/messages for the size of the core to be retrieved:

[email protected]# grep savecore /var/adm/messages
May 26 16:01:51 solaris savecore: [ID 570001 auth.error] reboot after panic: 
sync initiated
May 26 16:01:51 solaris savecore: [ID 353609 auth.error] not enough space in 
/var/crash/solaris (4692 MB avail, 48151 MB needed)

Find a directory on the system sufficient enough to carry the size of the core like /tmp

[email protected]# df -h /tmp
Filesystem             Size   Used  Available Capacity  Mounted on
swap                   169G    88K       169G     1%    /tmp

Go to that directory and create a temporary directory to save the core files:

[email protected]# cd /tmp
[email protected]# mkdir corefiles
[email protected]# cd corefiles

Then re-genrate the core files:

[email protected]# savecore -dv .

The . (dot) signifies the current directory your in and saves the core to this place.

See you on my next note!