How to gather data from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system for troubleshooting if the sosreport process goes to hung state?

Environment

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, 7, 8
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6+

Issue

• sosreport hangs during collection.
• sosreport does not finish as it goes to hung state.
• How to collect data for troubleshooting?

Resolution

• Do not interrupt the sosreport process

• Open another terminal window

• Change to sosreport's working directory:

  • RHEL 7, 8

      # cd /var/tmp
    

  • RHEL 6 and earlier

      # cd /tmp
    

• Find the temporary directory where the files are being stored, it will usually be named something like <hostname>-<random number>.

• Tar up the directory with the following command:

  # tar cvzf /tmp/`hostname`-partial-sos.tar.gz <sos temporary directory>
  

• The file <hostname>-partial-sos.tar.gz will contain any data that was able to be collected.

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