12. Support / Bugs / Problems

If you have problems getting samhain to run, or think that you have encountered a bug, then please check the FAQ first.

If your problem is not anwered there, you can visit the user forum(which is searchable, by the way) and ask there for help (recommended for questions of probably general interest), or send email to .

Please remember that a useful problem report should at least include the following three items:

  • What did you do?

  • What result did you expect?

  • What result did you obtain instead?

Please be sure to provide relevant details, such as:

  • your operating system, its release version, and the machine ( uname -srm ).

  • your operating system, its release version, and the machine ( uname -srm ).

  • the version of samhain that you are using, and the options that you have supplied to configure ,

  • the command line options used to start samhain, and

  • the samhainrc runtime configuration file.

  • If you think you have encountered a bug, it is usually very helpful if you run samhain in the foreground(i.e. not as daemon) with the command line switch -p debug to get some more information about the problem.

    It would be even more helpful if you first re-compile samhain with configure --enable-debug , and then run it with the command line switch -p debug (again, not as daemon, but in the foreground).

    Please compress the output using gzip , and send it as attachment to .

12.1. If samhain appears to hang indefinitely

If you have the impression that samhain hangs indefinitely, this could be due to a deadlock caused by some rare circumstance (it is not possible to fully test all possible configurations of samhain ).

The most useful thing to do then is to recompile samhain with --enable-debug=gdb , start it in the foreground under the control of the gdb debugger, and get a backtrace as soon as it seems to hang:

        bash$ gdb ./samhain
        (gdb) run -t check -p info --foreground --forever
	(samhain output) 
	[Ctrl-C]
        (gdb) thread apply all
        (gdb) backtrace