Posting tips for the Red Hat Discussion Area.

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Practical tips when posting to the Red Hat Discussion Forum:

Please help us to help you with these tips.

This is the crux of this post: You are our eyes and ears, if you don't give us details, it will make answering your question pretty tough if you give only vague information.

For Red Hat Learning Subscription issues, please promptly put in a ticket with Red Hat, this is a paid product, and Red Hat recommends that a ticket be made. Also see the Red Hat Learning Community at learn.redhat.com.

  • If you plan on migrating a collection of servers from one location to another, consider how many systems, how many subscriptions, and the network changes, and the virtualization method you are using. If this specific item is the case, you'd want to assess the vendor you use for your system virtualzation to determine how to migrate.
  • Please let us know if the system you are using is physical, virtual, this makes a difference. Example, if you can not see "/dev/sdb" after adding disk hardware, and it's a Dell, you may have to invoke the RAID BIOS and create a virtual disk using the RAID BIOS.
  • Please let us know what version of software you are running, what version of RHEL, all this makes a difference on how we help you.
  • Please start with the logs, and thoroughly evaluate your log files where possible for clues to the issue.
  • Do you have any full file systems? Are all your services up and running?
  • Run systemctl | grep fail, and what happens if you restart the failed service?
  • Examine the output of journalctl -xeu name_of_service_goes_here.
  • Please see the remainder of this post...
  • Posts without a lot of detail make it difficult for us to help you!

In general, please act like we may not know about your unique environment. Are you using RHEL 7, RHEL 8, or maybe an outdated version of RHEL? Are you using CentOS? Are you using a third-party non-Red Hat edition of software? Please give us any relevant details about your system because these details matter in giving trying to figure this out. The procedures to check or fix something may vary depending on the OS version for example.

Also check some basic things such as the disk consumption of your system to see if a disk is full perhaps? This command will check your file systems and sort by size with the most full (by percentage) partitions at the top of the results., with only the top 15 results in case you have a lot of attached partitions.

df -kl | sort -rnk5 | egrep -v tmpfs | head -15

A hat tip to the CentOS forums, where much of the below was borrowed (thanks Toracat).

Search for your question or problem here in the forum. You may find an answer is already provided, it's worth a look. Demonstrating that you have researched your question by describing what you have previously done to try to resolve your problem will give those who wish to aid you with more information for volunteers to help you. There is a search box in the main discussion area at the main discussion page where all discussions are listed (image below).
Search box for discussion area

Provide as much useful information as possible to assist others in helping you solve your problem. We don't know what hardware/software or version you are running, or how you have configured your system unless you tell us. It helps to know if you are using RHEL workstation, server, what version you are using too!

ADDED 3/9/2020
If let's say you are experiencing general unexpected slowness transferring files from one system to another, this could potentially be several things. People using Linux have potentially wildly different environments from one place to another. One business may have two offices in a city. Another company may support multiple locations across various locations and even be geographically separated by continents. There could even be issues where one subnet is isolated from another or a gateway is unique where instead of it being "dot-1" it is something else due to that company's setup. Often the problem may be a misconfigured /etc/resolv.conf. It could be an improper gateway. It could be patch-day with your network people doing patches. Maybe. You might have to run traceroute commands to determine issues perhaps. There are a wide variety of things to consider, and we honestly do not know your environment. Please help us help you with the relevant details.

ADDED If your issue relates to storage or a particular service on a system please inform us of the directory. Is the location your partition is filling up at /var? Perhaps /var/lib? Perhaps somewhere else? If you have a full or filling file system you wish to resolve and you initially want to grow your file system, there may be a better way than just growing /var. But without specifics, our initial help or solution could be a "WAG" and not targeted for the specific need you require for a tight deadline. Please give us details
Method to find what is filling up /var

[root@yoursystem ~] # df -PhT 
Filesystem                           Type        Size     Used      Avail    Use%     Mounted on
/dev/mapper/slash-var                  xfs          35.2G   34.2G      1G    98%      /var
<output truncated, This example just says /var is filling up>

Steps to determine what is filling up a specific directory. Start with the df command.

Next cd to /var

# cd /var
# pwd
/var
# du -sk /var/* | sort -nr | head -15
31G   /var/postgres-9-3
3G   /var/log
<output trunctated>
# mountpoint /var/postgres-9-3
/var/postgres-9-3 is not a montpoint
# mountpoint /var
/var is a mountpoint
  • The above example shows /var/postgres-9-3 filling up /var
  • The above example shows /var is a mountpoint
  • the above example shows /var/postgres-9-3 is not a mountpoint, but is feeding var

Error Messages

We also can not guess at what error message you may have received. Avoid the use of images where the text will do. It is far preferable to just copy/paste the exact text into the edit window. In some instances, the helpers need the text to enable searching for an answer. Some sites where images may be posted are often blocked by corporate firewalls, and most force the user to be exposed to their advertising.

If you have a hardware-related problem, please provide information about your hardware. We can not help answer questions like "help, my nic isn't working" without knowing what nic you have and what attempts you have made to configure it.

Use commands such as lspci, lsmod, lsusb or dmidecode to gather information about your hardware and provide that in your post (not necessarily all the time).

If you have a software-related question, please provide as much relevant information about your configuration as possible. Provide the version numbers of any software you are using, post the configuration file for the package you are having problems with and check your logs for relevant errors, and post these too (only the relevant errors please, not the whole log file).

Example for the above, Let's say your question relates in any way to the kernel, please show us what kernel(s) you have installed and running by providing the output from the following commands:

uname -a
rpm -qa kernel\* | sort

Formatting code for your post with three ~~~ characters before and after, it helps with the output you want us to examine.

~~~
# your code goes between the three tildes, easier to read
~~~

Markdown tips:

If you are going to post output, please use markdown format, place three tilde characters above and below the code "~~~" without quotes. This will avoid your commented code from becoming huge text, and make the code easier to read (which will help those who would help you).

English and non-English posts.

Previous Red Hat overseers of the Community Discussion area have reminded people that the Discussion Area intended for English Language posts, and for those who require help in their 1st-language proficiency to open a case directly with Red Hat. This may seem unusual, however, it is what I have seen previous Red Hatter's say in response. That being said, I've seen occasional posts where people post in a non-English language, and they occasionally do receive help. I will say that the probability of immediate responses and the time to respond will likely vary and be unpredictable if you post in a non-English language. If you are in doubt, it's recommended to open a case with Red Hat directly. When you do open a case, you can select numerous languages from a drop-down menu.

Regards,
RJ

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