Retrace SOP

Retrace server - provides complete tracebacks for unhandled crashes and show aggregated information for developers.

Contact Information

Owner

Fedora QA Devel, Fedora Infrastructure Team, ABRT team

Contact

#abrt, #fedora-admin, #fedora-noc

Servers

retrace*, faf*

Purpose

Provides complete tracebacks for unhandled crashes and show aggregated information for developers.

Description

The physical server (retrace.fedoraproject.org) runs two main services: retrace-server and FAF.

Retrace-server

The upstream for retrace server lives at:

https://github.com/abrt/retrace-server

When a user has the ABRT client installed and a process crashes with an unhandled exception (e.g., traceback or core dump), the user can send a request to retrace-server. The server will install the same set of packages plus debuginfo, and will return a traceback to the user that includes function names instead of plain pointers. This information is useful for debugging.

The upstream retrace-server allows users to upload coredumps through a web interface, but the Fedora instance disables this feature.

FAF

When a user decides to report a crash, data is sent to FAF. ABRT can also be configured to send microreports automatically, if desired.

FAF can aggregate similar reports into one entity (called a Problem). FAF provides a nice web interface for developers, allowing them to see crashes of their packages. It lives at:

https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/

Playbook

The playbook is split into several roles. There are two main roles

  • abrt/faf

  • abrt/retrace

These roles are copied from upstream. You should never update it directly. The new version can be fetched from upstream using:

cd ansible/abrt
rm -rf faf retrace
ansible-galaxy install -f -r requirements.yml --ignore-errors -p ./

You should review the new differences, and commit and push.

Then there are some roles which are local for our instance:

  • abrt/faf-local - This is run before abrt/faf.

  • abrt/retrace-local - This is run after abrt/retrace.

  • abrt/retrace-local-pre - This is run before abrt/retrace.

Services

FAF and retrace-server are web applications; only httpd is required.

Cron

FAF and retrace-server each have cron tasks. They are not installed under /etc/cron* but are installed as user cron jobs for the 'faf' and 'retrace' users.

You can list those crons using:

sudo -u faf crontab -l
sudo -u retrace crontab -l

All cronjobs should be Ansible managed. Just make sure if you delete some cron from Ansible that it does not remain on the server (not always possible with state=absent).

Directories

  • /srv/ssd - fast disk, used for PostgreSQL storage

  • /srv - big fat disk, used for storing packages. Mainly:

    • /srv/faf/lob

    • /srv/retrace

  • /srv/faf/db-backup/ - Daily backups of DB. No rotating yet. Needs to be manually deleted occasionally.

  • /srv/faf/lob/InvalidUReport/ - Invalid reports, can be pretty big. No automatic removal too. Need to be purged manually occasionally.

Front-page

The main web page is handled by the abrt-server-info-page package, which can be controlled using:

/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/abrt-server-info-page/config.py

DB

Only FAF uses a database. We use our own instance of PostgreSQL. You can connect to it using:

sudo -u faf psql faf

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›