Support data gathering tool

[Joseph Miller]

2009/5/31 Przemysław Kulczycki <przemekkulczycki at gmail.com>

> 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 but it may be a bit outdated now.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 <http://en.opensuse.org/Supportutils%0ASun/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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I like this suggestion, I think it really makes a lot of sense.  Kind of
makes me wonder why there isn't one already.  Przemysław Kulczycki, I have
looked at the Explorer page.  I don't see any reason for Ubuntu to not do
this as a shell script as well.  I am not familiar with actually using the
tool, however.  Would you be willing to design a little bit more how such a
tool should work?  The tool should probably have an option to save to a file
or to output to screen.  The -xorg option should probably also have a
-display alias or some such.  I don't know all the log files or commands to
run for each of these scenarios.  If someone could tell me which commands or
which log files were necessary for each scenario, I could put something
together and try to submit it.

-Joseph
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