A customer opened an issue with us, saying that his server emailed him a crash report. It did, and it was included in the incoming ticket. It was quite detailed and elegant in a way, well designed and prepared... and we had no earthly idea what it meant. The supervisor didn't know. The advanced support people didn't know. For awhile, the internet didn't – until I'd searched enough random lines in the report to come up with some hits on abrtd, and later it made sense due to the customer running CentOS. We though at first that it was a system crash from some 'abort daemon' but no, the name was an acronym: Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (daemon), a Red Hat/CentOS thing. The web hits further suggested that this tool watched for application crashes, not system crashes. We figured that uptime results would confirm that the box hadn't gone down, but the customer spent another two or three tickets finding the server password...
When the password was provided in the third ticket (I'd been the only one picking these up since I'd gotten the first one and was perversely curious), I got in and uptime confirmed that the box had been up for over 50 days. Then, I checked around the logs for something to correspond with the cryptic reports from abrtd. No luck. Fortunately, the net hits mentioned cli commands for this daemon, one of which was “list”. This was the jackpot, or at least the only promising lead. It gave six incidents (little report notices of about 5 lines each) with a timestamp and the app concerned in the fail. I recognized 5 out of six as normal for a CentOS box with cPanel, but #6 was odd: something or other ending in .py, and sitting in somebody's home directory.
Even a novice would suspect something amiss. I sprung into action and nicely suggested that perhaps he'd paid a developer to write this and might indicate to us what the script did, if anything. Also, the tool would probably flag as a problem some application activity that it hadn't been told about.
Success. The customer speculated that it was a local tool and that he'd look into it. Ticket retired.
The moral of the story is that these modern operating systems are so extensively appointed that you can be blindsided by features that no one knew about – even in a roomful of professionals. I am continually amazed at what I learn just by either answering a ticket, answering the phone or just standing around.
