Reporting Problems

Please report problems via email whenever possible.

If you encounter any sort of hardware or software problem with one of the centrally-supported computers, or if you encounter problems with other computer-related hardware (such as a printer), you may contact the Computing Facilities Staff for help.

In your mail message, please give an accurate description of the problem. If the problem is an unexpected error message, please include the error exactly as it appeared and also include the command you typed which produced the error.

A good rule of thumb: give us enough detail so that we can recreate the problem on our own. Remember to include the name of the computer on which the problem occurred!

Many problem reports which we receive do not contain enough information. They only tell us that there is a problem. This requires us to ask many questions of the person reporting the problem so that we can attempt to get the detail we need. If you provide the detail with the first message, we can solve the problem quicker and without having to ask you additional questions.

How NOT to Report a Problem

Here are some examples of poor problem reports. Hopefully they will serve as examples of how not to report problems. Each problem report includes a comment indicating what information is missing or why the report is incomplete.

"The printer is broken."
Which printer? And what is it not doing correctly?

"The disk is full."
Which disk? On which machine? There are hundreds of them in the department.

"Why won't the compiler compile my program?"
Which computer? What is the name of the file which failed? What is the error message?

"xdvi works fine for me, but not for user X. Can you fix it?"
How is it failing? What error message is produced?

"I can't read my mail. I used elm, but it doesn't work."
In what way did it fail? What was the error message? All installed software (especially something as important as elm) is supposed to work for everyone. If it doesn't, we need to know exactly what is wrong so that we can make it work.

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