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Way to find source of a kill -9 in AIX

Question & Answer


Question

Someone or, some tool has killed the DB2 process with signal 9 (kill -9) . How to track that in AIX

Cause

Signal 9 (SIGKILL) is a signal which cannot be handled by any product running under UNIX as per the design of any UNIX flavor. That is the reason no diagnostics can be collected or logged against the use of signal 9. That way, it's not possible to find the source of a signal 9 from DB2's data

Answer

There is a light-weight AIX tool called ProbeVue ( command is probevue) which could be setup to track the signal 9 flow along with other major signal flows against which a DB2 process could be terminated.

The way to use the probevue is to first create a script file kill.e as following :

kill.e
-------------------
int kill(long pid, int signo);
@@syscall:*:kill:entry
when (__arg2 == SIGKILL || __arg2 == SIGSEGV || __arg2 == SIGBUS || __arg2 == SIGABRT)
{
printf("pid %ld (%s) sent %ld to %ld:\n", __pid, __pname, __arg2, __arg1);
stktrace(PRINT_SYMBOLS|GET_USER_TRACE, -1);
printf("\n");
}
-------------------

Then, start the tracking by issuing below command as root user :
probevue -o probe_kill.out kill.e

Further examples and details could be obtained from following links :

ProbeVue Offers a Flexible Tracing and Debugging Tool :http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/aix/administrator/systemsmanagement/probevue_tracing/

probevue Command :
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v7r1/topic/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds4/probevue.htm

DeveloperWorks Article on ProbeVue
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/ProbeVue

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Document Information

Modified date:
16 June 2018

UID

swg21665320