Characterizing a Problem

You need to consider many questions while trying to characterize a problem. Start with global questions and gradually get more specific. Depending on the response, ask another series of questions until you have enough information to understand exactly what has happened. The key questions to ask are as follows:

Does the problem seem isolated to one user or program? Can the problem be reproduced? Did the problem occur under any of the following circumstances:
- While running a program
- While issuing a command
- While transmitting data
Does the problem affect all users? The entire realm? Has anything changed recently? The possibilities are as follows:
- New software and hardware installation.
- Same hardware but changes to the software. Has the configuration file been modified? Has the HP-UX configuration been changed?
- Same software but changes to the hardware. Do you the suspect hardware or software?

It is often difficult to determine whether the problem is hardware-related or software-related. Symptoms that indicate a hardware problem are as follows:

Intermittent errors.
Networkwide problems after no change in software.
Link-level errors, from logging subsystem, logged to the console.
Data corruption—link-level trace that shows that data is sent without error but is corrupt or lost at the receiver.

Symptoms that indicate a software problem are as follows:

Network services errors returned to users or programs.
Data corruption.
Logging messages at the syslog.

Knowing what has recently changed on your network can also help you understand whether the problem is software-related or hardware-related.

Characterizing a Problem

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