[lm-announce] IMPORTANT - LMF performance issues

[Jonathan Buzzard]

** High Priority **


A number of users are reporting problems with "Zeus". As per my announcement email of the new system please stop referring to the LMF (aka the Light Microscope Filesystem) as Zeus. It is some four years now since it was hosted on a server called Zeus, and as there are real servers doing other real work that I manage that are called Zeus and it is *extremely* confusing.

Secondly none of the tickets have sufficient information to enable me to investigate any of the reported problems. When reporting any problems please do the following

 1. Report the *full* text of any error message. It might not mean anything
    to you but it provides invaluable information to me as to the cause of
    problems.

 2. Report the time as precisely as possible when the problem occurred.
    That allows me to look in the server logs and see if they report anything
    at the time the error occured. Vague times such as yesterday or this
    morning are not helpful.

 3. Report the network name (usually the equipment number) of the computer
    that you where using when the problem occurred. All the computers that
    attach to the server have their own log file, so if I don't have the
    computer name it is like trying to look for a needle in a haystack.

If you follow the above then I have a chance of diagnosing the problem. If you don't then there is little I can do and any problem will persist.

As an example a good error report would like the following

 This afternoon (5/2/2008) at 13:02 while trying to save a file to the
 LMF from my workstation (LSC18326) I got the error message

   " An error occurred while renewing interface Local Area Connection:
     the requested service provider could not be loaded or initialized."

The more detailed and more accurate the information you provide me the more likely it is that I will be able to fix your problems.

JAB.



-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                      Tel: +441382-386998
Storage Administrator, College of Life Sciences
University of Dundee, DD1 5EH

The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish charity, No: SC015096