mcelog.service

[lee]

Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> writes:

> On 06/15/2013 12:21 PM, lee wrote:
>> Well, I usually don't do that, so what's the point in running this
>> service all the time?
>
> Once your hardware's going bad it may be too late to start it, and
> having it always running may help you learn (if it matters) when
> things started going bad.  (You may have thought you had a software
> issue, and finding that it's hardware can keep you from trying to
> track down a non-problem.)  Even if your system isn't bootable any
> more, you may be able to extract forensics from your hard drive that
> can help you pinpoint what's happened.  Think of it as the equivalent
> of having security cameras in a store; most of the time, there's
> nothing important in the tapes, but you keep them running anyway.

When the hardware has gone so bad that I can't start mcelog anymore, I
very likely can't retrieve information from the logfiles, either,
without fixing the problem first.  It's very likely that I will notice a
condition like this without running mcelog.  I'm not sure in which way
it would help me to be able to find out /when/ the hardware started
going bad because when it is failing, it needs to be fixed anyway.

In case there's a weird problem that makes me wonder if it's software or
hardware, I can still let mcelog run to see if something shows up.


Security cameras are an additional resource --- like another computer on
the network dedicated to the monitoring --- which I don't have.  If
constantly recording security cameras were decreasing your sales and had
very questionable benefit, you might ask yourself if it's worthwhile to
keep them running all the time and whether it's better to install a
button you can press to only start the recording when the store is
actually being robbed :)

Such cameras might scare off potential robbers, no matter whether they
are recording or not unless the robbers know what the cameras are doing,
whereas running mcelog doesn't scare the hardware off from going bad, no
matter whether it's recording or not ...


-- 
Fedora 18