The command techsupport creates a downloadable file which can be sent to product support personnel for troubleshooting purposes. The file is a compressed archive that contains information about the state of the InCenter system and/or nodes/HA clusters at the time the command is run. It is generally recommended to run the command immediately after the event being investigated.

The techsupport command options are described next.

For the InCenter System Only

The basic form of the techsupport command with no options creates a file only for the InCenter system and excludes any nodes controlled by InCenter:

admin@InCenter:/> techsupport
Collecting and storing Technical Support Information...
Technical Support file created:
InCenter-techsupport-2022-04-21T23_12_42.tar.gz

For the InCenter System and Selected Nodes

The -nodes option will add information for the specified nodes to the information about the InCenter system:

admin@InCenter:/> techsupport -nodes=my-node1,my-node2

All nodes can specified by using <all>:

admin@InCenter:/> techsupport -nodes=<all>

Note that the information included in the techsupport file for a node is the same as if the techsupport command had been run directly on the node.

Excluding InCenter Information

The -nosystem option excludes information about InCenter from the file generated. To generate a techsupport file for just the node called my-node1, the command would be:

admin@InCenter:/> techsupport -nosystem -nodes=my-node1

For High Availability Pairs

Instead of standalone nodes, the techsupport command can be applied to one or more HAPair objects. For example:

admin@InCenter:/> techsupport -nosystem -nodes=my-hapair

When applied to an HAPair, the techsupport command is run twice at the node level, once for each node in the pair, and both sets of information are then included in the file created.

Downloading the Techsupport File

The file created by the techsupport command can be downloaded from the InCenter server using SCP. It is saved into a directory called techsupport under the /mgmtsystem/storage directory. The file can therefore be downloaded by connecting on port 22 of the management IP address. A typical SCP download command could take the following form:

> scp admin@<mgmt-IP>:./techsupport/<techsupport-filename> .

Unavailable Nodes

When retrieving nodes may not be able to respond with the required information. A node might refuse the connection or may not respond to the request at all, possibly because it is not active.

Even if there are errors and no useful information is available, the techsupport command will still write a new file. Any error messages will be included in the file.

File Housekeeping

The files created by the techsupport command will not be deleted automatically by the system. Housekeeping of the files must be done manually by the administrator and it is recommended to do this routinely. Each file will take up disk space and if disk space runs low, the techsupport command will be unable to create an additional file.

All old techsupport files can be deleted to free up space with the -cleanup option:

admin@InCenter:/> techsupport -cleanup

Running techsupport Without the InCenter CLI

If, for some reason, the InCenter CLI is unavailable, the techsupport command can be run in the host Linux CLI by running the preinstalled script called techsupport.sh. This script is described further in Section 17.9, Scripts.

Note that the script has one feature that the command does not have which is the ability to include the current InCenter configuration in the output.