how to enable linux box to dump crash image on local disk

[amit mehta]

I've a Linux box which is crashing under a particular test scenario.
To debug this issue I was thinking of using the crash (man 8 crash)
utility (available by default on recent releases of RHEL and SuSE) .
This tool requires the kernel crash dump (vmcore) and the debugging symbols.
On my machine, I don't see any crash under /var/crash, Hence please
let me know the
configuration changes which i need to do to enable my machine to dump
the kernel image
locally (do i need to apply diskdump patches and rebuild the kernel??) whenever
there is a kernel crash. Kdump seem to be another tool for this job
but that requires a lot of
setup. Is there a *shortcut* to enable kernel crash dump facility ?

The debugging symbols can be found here:
http://ftp.riken.go.jp/Linux/slc/slc6X/updates/x86_64/debug/
http://ftp.riken.go.jp/Linux/slc/slc6X/updates/i386/debug/


-Amit