Troubleshooting

Software can help us troubleshoot configuration problems, and runtime errors. We can also investigate logs to understand more of how the software is behaving.

Each operating system has particular tools, here’s a brief table for comparison.

Where practical have spares of each item available. This enables us to test whether the fault is related to a specific item, or not. Be careful as failures may be a symptom of another problem - the cause. And sometimes, unfortunately, the cause may cause multiple and repeated faitures of other items. For instance, a short in a power lead may cause previously working fuses to fail.

Software utilities such as grep can help us filter and search files, including logs, for indicators of [possible] problems. However,grep needs to be downloaded and installed on Windows computers, or an existing utility called findstr can be used.