Hi,
It works fine for me on OSX (10.9.1) and the the yama detection disabled on ubuntu 13.07.
We've used it at customer sites to send out automatic emails when the hosts have gone down with the backtraces, and it seems to work there too (ubuntu 12.04).
Not really sure what else to suggest, sorry.
Well, I found it now :-) My config had security.allow_core_dumps = no. As it happens, that setting is entangled with panic_action's gdb attach. allow_core_dumps modifies PR_SET_DUMPABLE. From the man page of prctl: "PR_SET_DUMPABLE (since Linux 2.3.20) [... bla bla ...] Processes that are not dumpable can not be attached via ptrace(2) PTRACE_ATTACH." So, my bad for producing an inconsistent configuration ;-) It would be very nice if the comments near panic_action could give users a hint though "If your panic_action uses gdb attach (such as the examples below), remember to allow core dumps for this to work (security.allow_core_dumps)." That would avoid some amount of guesswork :-) Greetings, Stefan Winter -- Stefan WINTER Ingenieur de Recherche Fondation RESTENA - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education Nationale et de la Recherche 6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi L-1359 Luxembourg Tel: +352 424409 1 Fax: +352 422473 PGP key updated to 4096 Bit RSA - I will encrypt all mails if the recipient's key is known to me http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xC0DE6A358A39DC66