SDB:Collecting information for technical support using the siga utility

From openSUSE

Darragh Ó Héiligh 13:39, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Situation

SIGA: System Information GAthering.

You are experiencing an issue with your installation of OpenSuSE and to help technical support analyse the cause of the problem as fast as possible, you want to assist them by providing information specific to your system.

Note: These instructions apply to SuSE Linux 8.0 and later.

Procedure

Running the siga utility is quite straight forward. In short, you will need to enter a console, use the siga command to run the utility and email the resulting output in /tmp/siga/siga.html to SuSE technical support.

1. Firstly, turn on your computer and wait until you see your desktop. If automatic log on is not active, log in using your username and password.
2. Once you arrive at your desktop, use the alt f2 key combination to go to the launch application dialogue.
3. Now, go to a console by typing xterm and press enter. Note, if you are using Gnome as your window manager, you may want to use gnome-terminal to open the gnome specific alternative.
4. In the terminal, you will need to type a number of simple commands. these are shown below on separate lines. .
• sudo su
  When prompted for your password, type the password for your root account. This will elevate you to root privlidges.
• siga no
  This runs the siga utility but does not display the resulting output in the w3 web browser.
5. Now, you may use your favorite email client such as Evolution or KMail to email the file in /tmp/siga/siga.html to technical support.

To narrow the scope of the output that siga produces, you may use the following options:

• siga -m
  same as tail -f /var/log/messages Shows kernel messages.
• siga -modem
  shows modem related information.
• siga -hw
  shows hardware related messages.
• siga -boot
  shows boot up related information.
• siga -net
  shows network related information
• siga -laptop
  shows laptop specific information.
• siga -install
  shows info regarding installation.
• siga -sound
  shows sound related information.
• siga -x11
  shows x11 related information.
• siga -print
  shows printer information. Warning: this restarts th daemon cups!
• siga -cdr
  shows cd-r burner information.
• siga -isdn
  shows ISDN related information.

it is possible to combine the options, e.g. siga floppy -modem to produce specified output related to more target areas while in this example outputting to a floppy disk.