When I started working on Linux, I was interested in knowing how some of our Linux users approach an issue to troubleshoot. So today we will see how to do Linux troubleshooting in an nutshell(This is my personal and every person have their own way to troubleshoot an issue).

Quick way of doing troubleshooting

1)When I had a problem I will first try to pin point the issue, what is the present status of system and what it has to be. To do that I will use top, iostat, netstat, ps and many more commands to see system performance

2) Second, look into error either on console or log files which are most of the time located in /var/log folder.
3) If I am still unable to find the root cause of the issue, I will just Google it by just pasting the error message. Most of the times I will get answers here if the issue is some thing of  basic nature.
4) If you still did not  find a solution, then post the issue in online forums, groups etc. Definitely experts will help you.
5) Discuss with your seniors and friends who are into Linux administration what you have did and where you got struck up. When discuses with other then only ideas will open.
6) Last but not least try this if the servers are not in production environment restart the service and try to see you are able to resolve the issue and still if you face the issue try to reboot the server.

Long way of doing troubleshooting: Be a knowledgeable person

1)This is a kind of prevention before actual problem occurs. Try to put some safety nets like nagios, munin monitoring tools and e-mail alerts which will alert you if something is going to happen.

2) Study more about man pages, help pages on system and online documentation such as http://tldp.org/

3)Always open for a dialog and participate online discussions.

  • Forums(Example www.linuxforume.com, www.nixcraft.com etc).
  • Groups(yahoo groups is best place and the google groups).
  • Communities in stackoverflow.
  • Read Linux blogs such as http://www.cyberciti.biz/

4) Start with something you wanted to accomplish, for example, long time back I want to read one of my CHM format file in Linux which is by default not supported so I did a a lot of googling. When I got as far as I could, I would then ask people who knew more than me. I think that’s one way to start and find something specific you want to accomplish and figure out how to do it. Usually, in the course of doing it, you’ll learn additional things that will help you with your next issue.

5) Learn about other distro’s which will improve your cross OS knowledge best place to learn is http://www.distrowatch.org. Just downloading distros and dual booting to them.

6) Always update your self with latest technologies in Linux.

These are my personal experiences which I learn, please let me know your way of troubleshooting.

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.