Logging and debugging

The spectrumscale installation toolkit reports progress to the console, and certain options also log output to a file.

Console output

The install toolkit reports progress to the console. By default only information level messages are displayed. If more verbose output is required the -v flag can be passed to the spectrumscale command.

Note: this flag must be the first argument passed to the spectrumscale command; for example:

./spectrumscale -v install --precheck

Log files

In addition to console output, the install and deploy functions of the spectrumscale installation toolkit will log verbose output to the logs subdirectory of the toolkit (the full log path will be reported to the console when logging begins). The log file will always contain verbose output even if the -v flag is not specified on the command line.

Install and deploy checks

The install and deploy functions each have a set of checks performed before and after their main action. These checks can be triggered separately by using either the --precheck or --postcheck flag.

It is safe to run the pre- and post-checks multiple times, as they will interrogate the cluster but will not make any changes.

Note that, as with the full install and deploy functions, the pre- and post-checks will create a detailed log file that can be used to provide further detail about errors encountered.

Gathering support information

If an unresolvable error is encountered when using the toolkit, a support package can be gathered using the installer.snap.py script (available in the same directory as the spectrumscale tool).

Note: The installer.snap.py must be run from the toolkit directory.

The installer.snap.py will gather information from each of the nodes defined in the configuration and will package them so they are ready for submission to the IBM® Support Center. The script gathers:

Cluster configuration file
Install toolkit logs
Information from the local node of the protocol services
A GPFS™ snap file from each node defined in the configuration
Basic environment information from the local node including:
- Current OS and kernel version
- System message log (dmesg)
- File system usage
- Network configuration
- Current processes

Collection of core dump data

See the topic about changing configurations to enable spectrumscale to collect core dump data in Understanding the spectrumscale installation toolkit options.