Supportconfig Self Service via SCC/FTP

This document (7023007) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Situation

You may have been asked to provide a supportconfig during an interaction with SUSE Support.

The guide below outlines how to generate a supportconfig file, pass various options to supportconfig and offers methods to upload the resulting file.

Resolution

Running supportconfig

If the server does not have internet connectivity, you can create a supportconfig with the case number using -r and upload the tarball manually by running:

supportconfig -r <your case number>

Your case number can be seen in the SCC (SUSE Customer Center) dashboard.

For SUSE Manager 5.x systems the command to generate the supportconfig needs to be:

mgradm support config

This creates a file in "/root/scc_localhost_<date>_<time>.tar.gz" that contains the supportconfig files from both the host and the container. This is the file that is required by SUSE Support for SUMA 5.x environments.

Uploading a supportconfig file manually

You may upload a supportconfig file using the methods described in TID0019922: Uploading files for SUSE Support

Additionally, if your server is connected to the internet, you may use the methods described in Additional Information .

Excluding and including supportconfig data

Supportconfig separates data collection into features which are stored in separate files, such as lvm.txt. You can run:

supportconfig -F

to list all the available features. Most are turned on by default. You can toggle a feature's state using the -o <list> option, where <list> is a comma separated, case sensitive feature list. Please review supportconfig.conf(5) for each option's default state. If the feature is turned on, then -o will turn it off and vice versa. When supportconfig -F shows LVM as a feature, the corresponding man page entry will prepend OPTION_ to the feature tag as in OPTION_LVM.

Examples:
Observe the current feature list:

supportconfig -F

APPARMOR AUDIT AUTOFS BOOT BTRFS DAEMONS CIMOM CRASH CRON DHCP DISK DNS DOCKER DRBD ENV ETC EVMS HA HAPROXY HISTORY IB ISCSI KVM LDAP LVM LXC MEM MOD MPIO NET NFS NTP OCFS2 OFILES PAM PRINT PROC SAM SAR SLERT SLP SMT SMART SMB SRAID SSH SSSD SYSCONFIG SYSFS TUNED UDEV UFILES UP WEB X XEN aFSLIST aLOGS aMINDISK aMAXYAST aRPMV aSLP aLOCAL_ONLY

To run a default supportconfig, but exclude x.txt and web.txt information:

supportconfig -o X,WEB

Excluding sections may be useful in certain cases, such as long supportconfig runtimes on DAX filesystems described in this TID: TID0020270

Explicitly including sections may be useful as well and can be done with the -i option, e.g. :

supportconfig -i LVM

This option will gather a minimum amount of supportconfig data and include only the listed features. It is useful for gathering only the data needed and not the entire supportconfig.

NOTE: The -i option cannot be used to enable PAM data collection. You must use the FORCE_OPTION_PAM, see this TID: TID0019695

Other useful options

You may be asked by a Support Engineer to use the -l or -A options. Their function as described by the man pages is below:

-l Includes all log file lines. Gathers additional rotated logs. Includes commented lines in all configuration files.
-A Activates all supportconfig functions with additional logging and full rpm verification.

Cause

The supportconfig program is a utility that allows SUSE Support to help customers by collecting certain configurations, logs and diagnostic output in a tarball for upload. More information can be found in the manual pages, which can be accessed by the command:

man supportconfig

Additional Information

Uploading supportconfig file using builtin tools

Use a custom URL to temporarily change (-U) the upload target:

supportconfig -r <your case number> -U <target FTP server's full address>

You can also use supportconfig command line options to directly upload supportconfig tarballs to the SUSE FTP server. If you have internet connectivity on the server, use the -r option with -u or -a to upload the tarball. The -r includes the case number in the supportconfig tarball filename. The -u uploads the tarball via HTTPS to the SUSE North America FTP server at ftp://support-ftp.us.suse.com/incoming. The -a uploads files to the same FTP server using FTPES instead of HTTPS.

Examples:

Upload a supportconfig tarball using HTTPS to the SUSE North America FTP server with your case number:

supportconfig -ur <your case number>

Upload a supportconfig tarball using FTPES to the SUSE North America FTP server with your case number:

supportconfig -ar <your case number>

You may also change these destinations by implementing the changes in "Changing the default supportconig upload targets" section in this document.

Examples using curl to upload files via HTTP/HTTPS using curl:

curl -v -L -A SupportConfig -T "/path/to/file/filename.txt" "http://support-ftp.us.suse.com/incoming/upload.php?appname=supportconfig&file=filename.txt"

curl -v -L -A SupportConfig -T "/path/to/file/filename.txt" "https://support-ftp.us.suse.com/incoming/upload.php?appname=supportconfig&file=filename.txt"

Replace the "/path/to/file/filename.txt" with the full path/filename of your supportconfig file,
and at the end of the curl line, "filename.txt" should be replaced with the filename of your supportconfig.

Changing the default supportconfig upload targets

Supportconfig is configured to use one of two public ftp servers:

Region	Domain
North America	support-ftp.us.suse.com
Europe	support-ftp.emea.suse.com

You can use the -u or -a switch to automatically upload a supportconfig tarball to the SUSE public FTP server.

The -u switch uses HTTPS: VAR_OPTION_UPLOAD_TARGET="${SUSE_UPLOAD_NA_HTTPS}"
The -a switch uses FTPES: VAR_OPTION_UPLOAD_TARGET_ALT="${SUSE_UPLOAD_NA_FTPES}"

To use the SUSE EMEA FTP servers by default, run supportconfig -C to create a default /etc/supportconfig.conf file and change these default upload targets. An /etc/supportconfig.conf file configured for EMEA uploads would look like:

VAR_OPTION_UPLOAD_TARGET="${SUSE_UPLOAD_EMEA_HTTPS}"
VAR_OPTION_UPLOAD_TARGET_ALT="${SUSE_UPLOAD_EMEA_FTPES}"

If unencrypted FTP protocol has to be used, define

VAR_OPTION_UPLOAD_TARGET_ALT="${SUSE_UPLOAD_NA_FTP}"
or
VAR_OPTION_UPLOAD_TARGET_ALT="${SUSE_UPLOAD_EMEA_FTP}"

in the /etc/supportconfig.conf and then use the -a switch for uploads.

More information about which details are needed by customer care to troubleshoot an issue, can be found in TID#000017849 and TID#000017820.

NOTE:
supportconfig versions released before January 2021 may collect data which can be considered sensitive, such as usernames. Sharing that usually has no significant impact on system security, however, if that is excluding that information is important for other reasons – make sure to review the content.

In that case, do not use automated upload, but unpack the supportconfig archive in /var/log and remove content which is considered confidential before uploading to our support servers.

See also this TID#000019695 and TID 000021032

Disclaimer

This Support Knowledgebase provides a valuable tool for SUSE customers and parties interested in our products and solutions to acquire information, ideas and learn from one another. Materials are provided for informational, personal or non-commercial use within your organization and are presented "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.