  Identifying cause of system crashes? 
 The Question is:
 
Dear Mr. Wizard,
 
Since January of this year we have had 6 crashes
on a clustered 2100. Each crash was teh result of someone
editing a file using edt on a file of no system
consequence. The file was a report writer file (SQR).
 
I was only here for one of the crashes since I am new here,
but I have never seen or heard of an instance where a basic
user crashes a system by editing a file.
 
In the research that was done previously, nothing was really found.
Any ideas? (I realize that you probably need more info, but...)
 
Sincerely
 
Severly Stumped
 
 The Answer is:
 
  OpenVMS crashes can result from a hardware problem, or crashes can result
  from faulty privileged-mode software.
 
  The mechanism for analyzing such problems involves using the system
  crash dump analyzer utility (the SDA utility, invoked via the command
  ANALYZE/CRASH), and this utility requires configuring your system so
  that memory from a crash is automatically copied to disk during the
  system crash.  The steps necessary here are extensively covered in the
  OpenVMS system management documentation.
 
  If you are running privileged-mode software -- typically device drivers
  and user-written system services -- that did not originate from Digital
  (Compaq), you should use SDA to perform the initial analysis on the crash
  dump in order to determine what software is likely at fault, and then
  contact formal support personnel at the appropriate vendor.
 
  Regardless of what software you are running, you should ensure your
  machine is configured to write the crash dump data to disk.
 
  Hardware errors are also usually written to the system log either when
  the occur or as part of the recovery from a system crash.  You can use
  the DIAGNOSE command (recent OpenVMS versions; requires the DECevent
  utility be loaded) or the ANALYZE/ERROR command to read the error logs.
 
  The Wizard would also suggest accessing the DSNlink support databases,
  and acquiring a list of mandatory ECO kits -- then acquire and apply
  these ECO kits to your OpenVMS system.
