Okay, now it's time to look at SOS report. Now what is
SOS report? Well, SOS, it's actually an
international code that is used by many, many
people when they are in distress, or they want to
call out Mayday. So no one really knows exactly
what they really stand for, but if you like Google
it or go online, you will find that a few people
says SOS stands for like, save our soul, or save our
ship. Anyway, so SOS is something that is called
when someone is in really deep trouble and needs
help. So based on the same idea, Red Hat or
CentOS created something called SOS report, it's a
command, when you run that command, it actually
collects all the information about your files,
your logs, put it into a package, and it sends it
out to them. So again, what's the purpose of this
report? Collect and package diagnostic and
support data. So the package name that has to be
installed on your system, which usually comes pre
installed, or pre package when you are installing
Red Hat, or CentOS on your system, and the
package is sos-, and the version name depending
on which version you're running. And the command
that you will need to run to collect all that
data, all that files and directories is sosreport.
So let's run the sosreport command and
see how it works. Okay, so this is my Linux
machine. I am logged in as myself, I want you to become root.
[No audio]
Okay, so now I'm root. Now simply type
sosreport. This is the command, hit enter.
[Auhtor typing]
It's going to tell me the sosreport version, which is 3.5,
goes through changes as you upgrade or update your
system. It's telling you right here this command
will collect diagnostic and configuration
information from this CentOS Linux system and
install the application. And the location of all
the files that are collected or copied will be
under /var/tmp, and the file name will be sos.,
and so on, but the case number or the date and
time. Also, they asked you some information to
confirm and press enter to continue or CTRL C to
quit of it. If you did not intend to
run this command, or don't want to share your
configuration files with Red Hat support or
CentOS. So you go ahead and hit enter, and you
will see that will ask you, it will prompt you to
enter your first initial and last name. So put in
your first initial last name. Then the next
question is Please enter the case id that you are
generating this report for. Now the case id is
something that is given to you when you open up a
case with Red Hat. So you called up or you open up
online, you say hey, I'm having an issue with my
system and so and so, and they generate a case for
you, right. So you will have to enter the case id
here. So for this training purposes, we'll pick an
arbitrary numbers let's say 9000, 9000, hit enter.
And now you will see, it will collect all the
configuration files that are located in /etc,
it will collect all the logs, it will collect
all the system information. So all that
information is been packaged together into one
file or container which will be a tar file, and it
will be saved in your /var/tmp directory.
The reason we do that is because this way the
support do not have to come back to you to ask you
to provide certain configuration file or certain
information back and forth, back and forth. So they
will have all that information beforehand, before
they started asking you some additional questions.
So you'll see right now it's running, it's at 72
out of 99 processor. So it's probably going to
take somewhere from one minute to five minutes, of
course depending on your system. If your system is
very heavy, beefed up resources, then it will take
a little longer as well. So give it some time.
[no audio]
Okay, so the command completed successfully. And
now you will see right here, it's telling you, Your
sosreport has been generated and saved in a war
/var/tmp/sosreport with my user id, and right here,
this is the case number that we enter. Of course,
the case number will be different, in your case,
the date and time, and it's a tar file, and it is
compressed file because it's not that big. So what
do you have to do is, once you have that, once
you go to /var/tmp, and then you do ls -ltr,
and you'll see at the bottom, this is the file
that has been generated. You can ignore the other
md5 file, system checks some to make sure it has
all the required files that it was looking for. So
once you have this file, what do you have to do,
now you could just copy it over to Red Hat portal
through FTP if you have your communication open
from your system to them, or you could simply FTP
to your own desktop, and that's how you upload
this file to them. They will look at it and then
they will diagnose what the issue is. So that's
about sosreport. It's very useful and it's
required every time you become of course a system
administrator you will be asked to provide SOS
report when you open up a case with Red Hat.
[No audio]