How to Debug a Kernel Panic in Production

When your production server suddenly drops into a kernel panic, the instinct is to reboot and hope it doesn't happen again. Lucas and Luna walk through a real case from a fintech startup where a misconfigured memory module caused intermittent panics across a 200-node cluster. They explain how to capture crash dumps, read the stack trace to identify the offending driver or hardware, and use tools like kdump, crash, and mcelog to pinpoint the root cause. The episode also covers prophylactic measures: setting up netconsole for remote logging, enabling panic-timeouts for automatic reboot, and testing memory with memtest86 during maintenance windows. By the end, listeners will know exactly what to do the next time their server greets them with a blinking cursor on a black screen.

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