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BryanQuigley edited this page Oct 21, 2019 · 24 revisions

SoS (also referred to as sosreport) is an extensible, portable, support data collection tool primarily aimed at Linux distributions and other UNIX-like operating systems. SoS operates on the concepts of plugins, one for each area or subsystem that you want to collect data from. By default, plugins are dynamically run based on conditions on the system it's running on. Currently sosreport is only designed to be run as root.

Plugins can run based on:

  • Installed packages (generally recommended method)
  • Certain files existing
  • Commands existing in PATH

Each plugin can specify

  • Files to collect
  • Commands to run
  • Journal logs to collect

Confidentiality Protections

  • will attempt to sanitize passwords from the system that it knows about.
  • provides the ability to disable certain plugins (-n flag)

For Users

Running sos

  • To get a full listing of options for sosreport run the following: sosreport -h
  • To get a full listing of available plugins and their options run the following: sosreport -l
  • For most situations it's best to run sos with the default set of plugins enabled:
[bmr@hex ~]$ sudo sosreport
sosreport (version 3.2)

This command will collect system configuration and diagnostic
information from this Fedora system. An archive containing the collected
information will be generated in /var/tmp.

For more information on the Fedora Project visit:

  https://fedoraproject.org/

The generated archive may contain data considered sensitive and its
content should be reviewed by the originating organization before being
passed to any third party.

No changes will be made to system configuration.

Press ENTER to continue, or CTRL-C to quit.

If you don't want to be prompted for information while sos runs use batch mode:

[bmr@hex ~]$ sudo sosreport --batch

sosreport (version 3.2)

This command will collect system configuration and diagnostic
information from this Fedora system. An archive containing the collected
information will be generated in /var/tmp.

For more information on the Fedora Project visit:

  https://fedoraproject.org/

The generated archive may contain data considered sensitive and its
content should be reviewed by the originating organization before being
passed to any third party.

No changes will be made to system configuration.


 Setting up archive ...
 Setting up plugins ...
 Running plugins. Please wait ...

  Running 1/80: acpid...        
  Running 2/80: anaconda...        
  Running 3/80: anacron...        
  Running 4/80: ata...        
  Running 5/80: auditd...        
  Running 6/80: block...   
[...]
  Running 77/80: x11...        
  Running 78/80: xen...        
  Running 79/80: xfs...        
  Running 80/80: yum...        

Creating compressed archive...

Your sosreport has been generated and saved in:
  /var/tmp/sosreport-localhost.localdomain-20140624124103.tar.xz

The checksum is: ec1a45543567b519d5fb6683d573143b

Please send this file to your support representative.

[bmr@hex ~]$  

Manual pages:

Can I see what it is collecting?

Just extract the archive and take a look or use the --build flag to not make an archive and leave the temporary directory.

You can get an overview by looking at the sos_reports/sos.txt and sos_reports/sos.html. Using sos.html allows you to click on the file in one click.

For example apparmor plugin has:

apparmor
========================================================================
-  commands executed:
  * apparmor_status
  * ls -alh /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions
  * ls -alh /etc/apparmor.d/libvirt
-  files copied:
  * /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cups-browsed
  * /etc/apparmor.d/disable/usr.bin.firefox
  * /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox
  * /etc/apparmor.d/snap.core.4917.usr.lib.snapd.snap-confine
  * /etc/apparmor.d/nvidia_modprobe
  * /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.tcpdump
  * /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox
  * /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/securityfs

The logs plugin captures logs from /var/log/, journal logs (puts them in sos_commands/logs), and r/syslog config files.

For Developers

Developer guides

Submitting patches and pull requests

Stay in touch