The most common issues people have with
operating their UNIX workstation are:
- Accessing applications
- Accessing and managing files
- Printing
- Unresponsive terminal window
- Unresponsive application
- Unresponsive workstation
By the end of this course, you will be
more familiar with your workstation and the ability to do basic
troubleshooting yourself. For those problems you can't fix, you should
contact your designated system administrator or service/help desk
designated to help users with workstation problems.
If you do contact the company
service/help desk, they will probably ask you some information about your
system before they ask you about your problem.
Information about your workstation (type,
memory, OS release, etc.) can be viewed by choosing Hosts and then
Workstation Info from the Workspace Menu.
Accessing Applications
Typically applications are installed and maintained by the system
administrator. If you are having difficulty starting an application, you
should call the service/help desk. If you have questions regarding using
an application that did not come up in a training class, you should also
call the service/help desk.
Accessing and Managing Files
By the end of this course you will have worked with files and
directories enough so that you should feel comfortable doing some basic
troubleshooting on your own.
Printing
Most of your printing will be done from an application and is easy.
Printing files and managing print jobs is covered later in this course.
If a printer is down due to repairs or
other reasons and you can't print, contact the service/help desk.
Unresponsive Terminal Window
If a Terminal window's prompt becomes unresponsive to keyboard entry,
you may need to enable screen scroll, enter EOF (end of file), or
interrupt the process.
To check an unresponsive Terminal:
- Enable screen scroll using Control -Q
(Ctrl + q keys). Sometimes a user turns off screen scrolling using
Control-S and forgets to turn it back on and the terminal appears
locked.
- Interrupt the process using Control -C
(Ctrl + c keys). Control-C "cancels" the current task and
should restore the shell prompt.
- Enter EOF (end of file) using Control
-D (Ctrl + d keys). You may be in the middle of a UNIX command that
needs to be terminated by an EOF (bc, mail, mailx, etc.).
- Quit the window and restart a new one.
Unresponsive Application
If an application becomes unresponsive, try to "Close" the
window using the mouse. If that does not work you have two options:
- Determine the process ID number
associated with the application and kill that process (covered in
Chapter 13 - System Processes and Memory Management)
- Log out and log back in again then restart the application.
Unresponsive Workstation
If the window environment or system in its entirety becomes
unresponsive, there is a series of steps you can perform.
When attempting to unlock an unresponsive
system, the first thing to do is to go to another system and do a remote
login and terminate the login shell program. The rlogin,
ps, and
kill
commands are covered in more detail later in this curriculum.
If the above procedure does not work, you
will have to reboot your system using one of the following:
- The Stop-A (Stop + A key) keyboard
sequence on a Sun workstation is used to Abort and should only be used
when the system is completely unresponsive to keyboard and mouse input
for a period of minutes. The Stop-A sequence abruptly aborts and does
not bring down the system cleanly. The Stop-A brings the system down to
a ">" (greater than) prompt where you can issue the
"b" (boot) command to reboot.
- If the abort (Stop-A) does not work, your
last resort is to power-off the system, wait ten seconds, then power-on
the system.
Note: It is best to contact a system administrator or the
service/help desk before attempting this procedure.
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