Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed

Generating a System Report 417FIGURE 20.4Wireshark After Capturing PacketsGenerating a System ReportWhen troubleshooting a system, it is often useful to generate a system report so that datacan be analyzed as a whole or to send to other administrators on the team or a customersupport representative. The sysreport program is often used by the Red Hat support teamand can be invaluable when searching for the root of a problem.The program is provided by the sysreport RPM package. If it is not installed, install itusing Red Hat Network (refer to Chapter 3).The sysreport command must be run as the root user because it must be able to gatherconfiguration information only accessible by the root user. The program itself is actually ashell script written by Red Hat as a tool that allows customers to easily send their supportrepresentative detailed information about the hardware and software on a given system.This allows customers to execute one command for common troubleshooting data insteadof a series of commands they may not be familiar with.After you execute the command sysreport as root, you will see the following message:This utility will go through and collect some detailed informationabout the hardware and setup of your Red Hat Linux system.This information will be used to diagnose problems with your systemand will be considered confidential information. Red Hat will usethis information for diagnostic purposes ONLY.20