Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

28.5.3. Saving Package Information

In a single-machine ABRT installation, problems are usually reported to external bug databases such as RHTSupport or Bugzilla. Reporting to these bug databases usually requires knowledge about the component and package in which the problem occurred. The post-create event runs the abrt-action-save-package-data tool (among other steps) in order to provide this information in the standard ABRT installation.
If you are setting up a centralized crash collection system, your requirements may be significantly different. Depending on your needs, you have two options:
Internal analysis of problems
After collecting problem data, you do not need to collect package information if you plan to analyze problems in-house, without reporting them to any external bug databases. You might be also interested in collecting crashes that occur in programs written by your organization or third-party applications installed on your system. If such a program is a part of an RPM package, then on client systems and a dedicated crash collecting system, you can only add the respective GPG key to the /etc/abrt/gpg_keys file or set the following line in the /etc/abrt/abrt-action-save-package-data.conf file:
OpenGPGCheck = no
If the program does not belong to any RPM package, take the following steps on both, client systems and a dedicated crash collecting system:
  • Remove the following rule from the /etc/libreport/events.d/abrt_event.conf file:
    EVENT=post-create component=
            abrt-action-save-package-data
  • Prevent deletion of problem data directories which do not correspond to any installed package by setting the following directive in the /etc/abrt/abrt-action-save-package-data.conf file:
    ProcessUnpackaged = yes
Reporting to external bug database
Alternatively, you may want to report crashes to RHTSupport or Bugzilla. In this case, you need to collect package information. Generally, client machines and dedicated crash collecting systems have non-identical sets of installed packages. Therefore, it may happen that problem data uploaded from a client does not correspond to any package installed on the dedicated crash collecting system. In the standard ABRT configuration, this will lead to deletion of problem data (ABRT will consider it to be a crash in an unpackaged executable). To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to modify ABRT's configuration on the dedicated system in the following way:
  • Prevent inadvertent collection of package information for problem data uploaded from client machines, by adding the remote!=1 condition in the /etc/libreport/events.d/abrt_event.conf file:
    EVENT=post-create remote!=1 component=
            abrt-action-save-package-data
  • Prevent deletion of problem data directories which do not correspond to any installed package by setting the following directive in /etc/abrt/abrt-action-save-package-data.conf:
    ProcessUnpackaged = yes

Note

Note that in this case, no such modifications are necessary on client systems: they continue to collect package information, and continue to ignore crashes in unpackaged executables.