Book Image

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide

By : Benjamin Cane
Book Image

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide

By: Benjamin Cane

Overview of this book

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an operating system that allows you to modernize your infrastructure, boost efficiency through virtualization, and finally prepare your data center for an open, hybrid cloud IT architecture. It provides the stability to take on today's challenges and the flexibility to adapt to tomorrow's demands. In this book, you begin with simple troubleshooting best practices and get an overview of the Linux commands used for troubleshooting. The book will cover the troubleshooting methods for web applications and services such as Apache and MySQL. Then, you will learn to identify system performance bottlenecks and troubleshoot network issues; all while learning about vital troubleshooting steps such as understanding the problem statement, establishing a hypothesis, and understanding trial, error, and documentation. Next, the book will show you how to capture and analyze network traffic, use advanced system troubleshooting tools such as strace, tcpdump & dmesg, and discover common issues with system defaults. Finally, the book will take you through a detailed root cause analysis of an unexpected reboot where you will learn to recover a downed system.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

When the application won't start


For this chapter's problem, we will start as we have with most other problems, except today, rather than receiving an alert or phone call, we are actually asked a question by another systems administrator.

The systems administrator is attempting to start an application on the blog web server. When they attempt to start the application, it appears to be starting; however, at the end, it simply prints an error message and exits.

Our first response to this scenario is of course the first step in the troubleshooting process—duplicate it.

The other systems administrator informs us that they are starting the application by performing the following steps:

  1. Logging into the server as the vagrant user

  2. Moving to the directory /opt/myapp

  3. Running the script start.sh

Before going any further, let's attempt those same steps:

$ whoami
vagrant
$ cd /opt/myapp/
$ ls -la
total 8
drwxr-xr-x. 5 vagrant vagrant  69 May 18 03:11 .
drwxr-xr-x. 4 root    root     50 May 18 00:48 ..
drwxrwxr...