Support data gathering tool

[Przemysław Kulczycki]

Ubuntu needs a data gathering tool for user support and bug reporting.
Currently when filing bug reports users have to manually run lots of 
commands (dmesg, lspci, lsusb, lsmod, alsa-something...) for 
troubleshooting their issues.

Ubuntu should have a tool to gather all necessary system logs for 
reporting bugs and asking for support on answers.launchpad.net.

I work for Sun and I find their Explorer tool very handy.
It collects many system logs and outputs of system commands to show the 
system configuration and issues to the support team. It also has some 
options to skip some logs when the customer feels if it will violate his 
privacy.
Red Hat has something similar, though not as developed as Explorer. 
Their sos (son of sysreport) tool is GPLed and could be tweaked to run 
on Debian/Ubuntu.

Suse used to have Siga, now they have supportconfig, but I'm not 
familiar with it.

There is also an independent distro-agnostic tool called Linux Explorer 
but it may be a bit outdated now.

Having an explorer-like tool in Ubuntu would benefit both desktop and 
server users.
Bugreporting would be much easier. You would only have to run one 
command, maybe with some options, to provide all the data needed for the 
bug troubleshooters.
Example options could be:
toolname -audio
toolname -usb
toolname -kernel
toolname -all
toolname -xorg
toolname -network

Appropriate options would be used for relevant problem types (ie. -audio 
for sound problems).

Links:
Red Hat: sosreport, earlier: sysreport
https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/sos/
Suse: supportconfig, earlier: Siga
http://en.opensuse.org/Supportutils
Sun/Solaris: Explorer
http://sunsolve.sun.com/explorer
Independently developed Explorer-clone for Linux:
http://www.unix-consultants.co.uk/examples/scripts/linux/linux-explorer/

Check out the Explorer page and its documentation to see how it's useful.
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-9-82329-1
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## Przemysław Kulczycki <<>> Azrael Nightwalker ##
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