Re: Ximian Red Carpet

[Henry Katz <henry katz iscs-i COM>]

Telsa Gwynne wrote:

On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 10:45:07PM -0500 or thereabouts, Henry Katz wrote:
> Robert Sean Hartnett wrote:
>
> > For an unknown reason Red Carpet is no longer working for me. I start it
> > up and the splash screen just sits there like a dead fish.
> > To kill it I have to go to a command line and do a kill -9 on the
> > process. Anyone have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this?
>
> strace
> ltrace
> tcpdump
>
> shall I continue?

On this list? If you expect that to be any help then you had
better continue and _explain_ them, yes; since those are all
command line programs which I don't think a Gnome  user should

Telsa,

With all due respect, underlying assumptions for my response were that the "gnome user"
is somewhat more facile with command line applications when necessary to understand
what the GUI is concealing.

>  
> have to be familiar with. strace doesn't even exist on
> Solaris ('truss'). ltrace has a man page description that
This is true but my assumption was also that we solaris users are far in
the minority compared to
Linux users.
> doubtless makes sense to hackers, and then spoils
> it with a
> bug of "Manual pages and documentation are not very up-to-date"
ltrace is the equivalent of solaris' sotruss and assumes rudimentary knowledge
of C application development
and usage of library calls.
> (on Linux). And tcpdump is frankly arcane magic as
> far as
This was the bonus information in the rare event that the user had already
attempted to investigate using the
first set of tools and was unable to locate an obvious source of error.

I'm concerned, and I not not particularly afraid of the command
line, and seems complete overkill to me.

What will tcpdump (or ethereal, which at least has a nice gtk
interface) tell you that "ping wherever.ximian.com" won't?

In some events network connectivity exists for ICMP packets but socks,
ipfilters or other firewall barriers
have been misconfigured to block other TCP sockets. Telnet ximian.com
port would probably be easier in
this case.
> strace may help, but it might be worth explaining
> how one interprets
> the results -- or even captures them into a file to read. And
> before that, just running "red-carpet" at the command-line might
> produce some helpful output, and it will be a lot simpler than
> the output of strace.
The original thinking was that perhaps the user new how to "see" what the
underlying application is actually
doing and identify an obvious misconfiguration. Typically I see that
by examining the open(),access() and
stat() system calls I quickly identify misconfigurations (files in
the wrong place, missing, bad perms, etc...)
I don't have time to describe all techniques to use these tools but
would attempt to answer a specific query,
should time permit. Vague symptoms do not count.

Setting verbose logging on various apps may reveal obvious misconfiguration flaws.

> I apologise if the original questioner knows all
> about these

> commands and how to use them; but I think three commands
> and

> "shall I continue?" is not particularly helpful.
Again, linux prides itself on its tightness and pithiness. My attempt was
to jog the users memory to say
"oh yeah - I could try that to see what's going on...". Instilling
self-reliance and independence should be promoted (as well as other conventional
support channels).

Cheers,
Henry

 

Telsa
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