Novell Support Link

When problems arise with a system, the simple is often overlooked. Is the monitor still plugged in? Is the install media in the DVD drive? Was the service started? This is something you can simply check by yourself. But what if the problem isn't visible? What if you need to dive deep into technics to find the reason for the crash? And what if you need help from experts?

You might be quite familiar with the scenarios below–no matter if you are just a normal computer user or a professional data center manager.

Imagine you are sitting in front of your computer, writing a simple but important document for your director. Suddenly your system or application crashes, and the work of the last three hours is lost. You try to find the problem by yourself, but you cannot find anything. You reach out to your IT department for support. You would like to help these nice IT guys to find the reason why your system crashed–but you don't have the skills to reproduce the crash, and you can't remember what you did before the crash happened.

Or, you are running a database server in your data center. In the middle of the business day, your server crashes. Your users don't have access to the data they need, and they are not productive anymore. They start screaming at you–and you wish you would have been notified about the crash by your system, and you wish you would have easy access to all system information about the crash.

Debugging program crashes without any automated tool is very time consuming and hard for everybody, be it a system administrator, a developer or an end user. Many program crashes remain unreported or unfixed because:

• You cannot easily reproduce many of the crashes
• You spend a big part of your time to collect the relevant data about the crash itself, about package versions, hardware architecture, operating system version, etc.
• As an end user, you normally do not know how to get a crash report
• If you know how to get the crash report, you loose time in reading and understanding it
• Finally, you don't have an easy-to-use frontend available which allows you to submit a detailed problem report quickly

This is where Novell Support Link comes into the play.

How It Works

Novell Support Link is a supportability infrastructure component of the SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 platform. It uses the "supportconfig" script of the "supportutils" tool integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise, which is designed to gather system troubleshooting information. Supportconfig organizes the system information to reduce problem resolution time. And it shows you all commands and files it had used to gather the system information, which–if you are expert enough–help you to better understand the mechanisms. Finally, it creates a tarball file with all relevant diagnostic information. And if you want, Novell Support Link securely transfers the support diagnostic information back to Novell Technical Services, or through the intuitive YaST interface, or via command line.

Benefits

The Novell Support Link allows you to easily file a support incident with Novell Technical Services, and provides you with the following benefits. You can:

• Access your webbrowser via the YaST module for quick reporting of an incident to Novell Technical Services.
• Review any and all data before submitting them to Novell Technical Services. This is especially helpful if you have internal fine-grained policies as to what to share.
• Decide by yourself which data you want to submit–you can discard any bits you consider sensitive at your site.
• Enable diagnostics performed by the downloadable Novell Support Advisor from Novell Technical Services.
• Leverage the infrastructure for internal or for OEM use. If you are a customer, you can send the crash report to your own IT administrator for analysis. If you are an OEM partner, you can use Novell Support Link to upload your customer's system information directly to your support infrastructure–without uploading it first to Novell–for Level 1 and Level 2 support.

In short, by using Novell Support Link, you can collect detailed and organized system information in a manner that helps reduce service request resolution times. And you can interact with Novell Technical Services in a way that promotes resolving problems as quickly as possible.