Ubuntu Manpage: sos - A unified tool for collecting system logs and other debug information

NAME

       sos - A unified tool for collecting system logs and other debug information

SYNOPSIS

       sos component [options]

DESCRIPTION

       sos  is  a  diagnostic  data  collection  utility,  used by system administrators, support
       representatives, and the like to assist in troubleshooting issues with a system  or  group
       of systems.

       The most well known function is  sos report or sos report as it was previously known.

       An  sos  archive  is  typically  requested  by  support  organizations to collect baseline
       configuration and system data from which to begin the troubleshooting process.

COMPONENTS

sos supports several subcommands or components. Each provides a different set of
information for the user. Supported components are as follows

report Report generates an archive of system information including configuration files and
command output. Information included in the report is based upon plugins that are
activated automatically when certain criteria, such as installed packages, files,
services, or system architecture is detected.

See sos report --help and man sos-report for more information.

May also be invoked via the alias rep or the deprecated command sos report.

collect
Collect is used to capture reports on multiple systems simultaneously. These
systems can either be defined by the user at the command line and/or defined by
clustering software that exists either on the local system or on a "primary" system
that is able to inform about other nodes in the cluster.

When running collect, sos report will be run on the remote nodes, and then the
resulting archives will be copied from those nodes to the local system running sos
collect. Archives are then removed from the remote systems.

See sos collect --help and man sos-collect for more information.

May also be invoked via the alias sos collector or the deprecated command sos-
collector.

clean|cleaner|mask
This subcommand takes input of either 1) an sos report tarball, 2) a collection of
sos report tarballs such as from collect, or 3) the unpackaged directory of an sos
report and obfuscates potentially sensitive system information that is not covered
by the standard postprocessing of sos report.

Such data includes IP addresses, networks, MAC addresses, and more. Data obfuscated
by this command will remain consistent throughout the report and across reports
provided in the same invocation. Additionally, care is taken to maintain network
topology relationships between matched data items.

See sos clean --help and man sos-clean for more information.

May be invoked via either sos clean, sos cleaner, sos mask, or via the --clean,
--cleaner or --mask options for report and collect.

help This subcommand is used to retrieve more detailed information on the various SoS
commands and components than is directly available in either other manpages or
--help output.

See sos help --help and man sos-help for more information.

GLOBAL OPTIONS

sos components provide their own set of options, however the following are available to be
set across all components.

--batch Do not prompt interactively, user will not be prompted for any data

--encrypt
Encrypt the resulting archive, and determine the method by which that encryption is
done by either a user prompt or environment variables.

When run with --batch, using this option will cause sos to look for either the
SOSENCRYPTKEY or SOSENCRYPTPASS environment variables. If set, this will implicitly
enable the --encrypt-key or --encrypt-pass options, respectively, to the values set
by the environment variable. This enables the use of these options without directly
setting those options in a config file or command line string. Note that use of an
encryption key has precedence over a passphrase.

Otherwise, using this option will cause sos to prompt the user to choose the method
of encryption to use. Choices will be [P]assphrase, [K]ey, [E]nv vars, or [N]o
encryption. If passphrase or key the user will then be prompted for the respective
value, env vars will cause sos to source the information in the manner stated
above, and choosing no encryption will disable encryption.

See the sections on --encrypt-key and --encrypt-pass below for more information.

--encrypt-key KEY
Encrypts the resulting archive that sos report produces using GPG. KEY must be an
existing key in the user's keyring as GPG does not allow for keyfiles. KEY can be
any value accepted by gpg's 'recipient' option.

Note that the user running sos report must match the user owning the keyring from
which keys will be obtained. In particular this means that if sudo is used to run
sos report, the keyring must also be set up using sudo (or direct shell access to
the account).

Users should be aware that encrypting the final archive will result in sos using
double the amount of temporary disk space - the encrypted archive must be written
as a separate, rather than replacement, file within the temp directory that sos
writes the archive to. However, since the encrypted archive will be the same size
as the original archive, there is no additional space consumption once the
temporary directory is removed at the end of execution.

This means that only the encrypted archive is present on disk after sos finishes
running.

If encryption fails for any reason, the original unencrypted archive is preserved
instead.

--encrypt-pass PASS
The same as --encrypt-key, but use the provided PASS for symmetric encryption
rather than key-pair encryption.

--config-file CONFIG
Specify alternate configuration file.

-s, --sysroot SYSROOT
Specify an alternate root file system path.

--tmp-dir DIRECTORY
Specify alternate temporary directory to copy data during execution.

--threads THREADS
Specify the number of threads sos report will use for concurrency. Defaults to 4.

-v, --verbose
Increase logging verbosity. May be specified multiple times to enable additional
debugging messages.

The following table summarizes the effects of different verbosity levels:

1 (-v) : Enable debug messages for sos.log. Show individual plugins
starting.
2 (-vv) : Also print debug messages to console.
3 (-vvv) : Enable debug messages for archive file operations. Note this will
dramatically
increase the amount of logging.

-q, --quiet
Only log fatal errors to stderr.

-z, --compression-type {auto|xz|gzip}
Compression type to use when compression the final archive output

--help Display usage message.

MAINTAINER

       Maintained on GitHub at https://github.com/sos report/sos

AUTHORS & CONTRIBUTORS

       See AUTHORS file in the package documentation.

                                            April 2020                                     sos(1)