A work in progress. Hopefully this will eventually be a list of directions, starting from “something's wrong” and ending with you knowing what's wrong and hopefulyl being able to address it.

There are several basic problems that can hit WPICS, most of which we can address:

• Printing doesn't work.
• can't login to my PC (Windows).
• connecting using SSH/PuTTY hangs after login.
• Mapping drives doesn't work.
• Mail is not flowing (into CS, out of CS?)
• Program that worked [recently] doesn't work now
• Can't reach [some website]
• Outlook delay when starting up.
• I deleted a file/files, please help me!
• Disk quota and disk space issues.
• Cannot connect to Turnin

Eventually I will have pages for each of these (and additional) problems.

At times it isn't obvius what the trouble is. When you know something's wrong but you don't know what it is, a great place to go is to the logfiles. Depending on what you're trying to troubleshoot though, the logs might be in any of a number of places! Here's a list of logfile-locations:

These are stored locally on most UNIX/Linux machines in /var/log. However most machines in WPICS also send mail to a central log server, cslog.cs.wpi.edu in the same directory: /var/log.

CSLOG contains many many logfiles for different categories, but if you don't know where to look you can check /var/log/all.log, which contains a copy of everything arriving on the log server. Running this command:

 tail -f /var/log/all.log

Is a good way to see what's going on in the department!

There are two main machines in the department that process SAMBA-related requests.

• Logins and authentication requests (i.e., password checking) are processed on cs.wpi.edu and can be found in hundreds of logfiles in /var/log/samba. Each machine making a request has its own file in there.
• Requests for \\csshare based resources, like the office share or a user home directory \\csshare\username are stored in more hundreds of logfiles in csshare.wpi.edu:/var/log/samba.

If someone is making multiple requests for a \\csshare based directory witha bad password you will see many bad requests on cs.wpi.edu from csshare, and you will need to go to csshare (currently tank1.cs.wpi.edu) and dig through the logs there to find out what the actual machine is that is making the requests.

Davis is the only other machine in the department that gets frequent SAMAB share requests. Its logfiles should be in /var/log/samba except that /var on that old computer hasn't enough space, so the logs are located in /home1/samba.

The department's webserver runs on www.cs.wpi.edu, which is currently tank1.cs.wpi.edu. Its logfiles are stored in /var/log/httpd*log … there are many different virtual servers on tank1, and each one has its own access logfile and error logfile.

Other machines running webservers in the department are: Davis (probably the most important non-departmental webserver), Turnin, Imladris, Mettowee, Congo … most of these are of no consequence to the rest of the department.