The “sosreport” is a tool to collect troubleshooting data on RHEL/CentOS systems. It generates a compressed tarball of debugging information that gives an overview of the most important logs and configuration of a Linux system, to be sent to Redhat Support. Among other things, the sosreport includes information about the installed rpm versions, syslog, network configuration, mounted filesystems, disk partition details, loaded kernel modules and status of all services.
To run sosreport, the package “sos” must be installed. This is usually installed by default, unless the system was installed with a custom package set. If it is not installed, it can be installed from the yum repository. It is also a good idea to make sure it is up to date.
# yum install sos
To create the sosreport can be as simple as running the command in a terminal, without arguments, as root:
# sosreport
It will ask for some information related to a support case:
# sosreport sosreport (version 2.2) This utility will collect some detailed information about the hardware and setup of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux system. The information is collected and an archive is packaged under /tmp, which you can send to a support representative. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will use this information for diagnostic purposes ONLY and it will be considered confidential information. This process may take a while to complete. No changes will be made to your system. Press ENTER to continue, or CTRL-C to quit. Please enter your first initial and last name [geeklab]: Sandeep Please enter the case number that you are generating this report for [None]:
On completion, a compressed tarball will be created in /tmp, along with a file containing the md5sum so that the file’s integrity can be verified by the support representative. The filename will be printed to the terminal:
Creating compressed archive... Your sosreport has been generated and saved in: /tmp/sosreport-Sandeep-20151011150306-c847.tar.xz The md5sum is: ef729c471178c87582ae422290c1c847 Please send this file to your support representative.
It is possible to have the sosreport created somewhere other than /tmp by setting the TMPDIR environment variable when running the sosreport command:
# TMPDIR=/home/jdoe sosreport
Additional options
To list available plugins in sosreport:
# sosreport -l sosreport (version 2.2) The following plugins are currently enabled: acpid acpid related information anaconda Anaconda / Installation information auditd Auditd related information autofs autofs server-related information bootloader Bootloader information cgroups cgroup subsystem information crontab Crontab information devicemapper device-mapper related information (dm, lvm, multipath) dovecot dovecot server related information filesys information on filesystems ............
If the system has a lot of packages installed, and sosreport takes a long time to complete, support may request that you disable the rpm database verification (verifies all packaged files on the filesystem against the rpm database)
# sosreport -k rpm.rpmva=off