Versions

The next thing that you should supply is the versions of the various commands that you may have been using. This can be done by using the ls and cksum commands. For our example above, you'll want to tell tech support which version of the telnet command you were using, and the version of the TCP/IP protocol stack etc.

# ls -l /usr/bin/telnet /lib/dll/devnp-e1000.so
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root      bin           64220 Jun 22 05:36 /usr/bin/telnet
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root      bin           27428 Jun 22 03:29 /lib/dll/devnp-e1000.so

# cksum /usr/bin/telnet /lib/dll/devnp-e1000.so
1217616014      64220 /usr/bin/telnet
  50089252      27428 /lib/dll/devnp-e1000.so

This gives tech support at least some idea of the dates, sizes, and checksums of some of the products that might be involved in the problem.

If you suspect your problem might be related to a platform-specific interaction, you should of course specify the name, brand, and relevant chipsets used on that particular platform.

Another thing that tech support usually requests, especially if they suspect some problems with insufficient memory, licensing, configuration, etc., is the runtime configuration of your system. You should try to give them an idea of how much memory is installed, how many processes are running, what the approximate load on the system might be, etc.

The more information you have, the faster they can help you.