How-To: Write a Good Ticket¶

Can you solve the question yourself?

Please try to solve the question yourself with this manual and Google.

If the problem turns out to be hard, we're happy to help.

This page describes how to write a good help request ticket.

Write a descriptive summary.
- Which cluster are you on? We only support HPC 4 Research.
- Put in a short summary into the Subject.
- Expand on this in a first paragraph. Try to answer the following questions:
  - What are you trying to achieve?
  - When did the problem start?
  - Did it work before?
  - Which steps did you attempt to achieve this?
Give us your basic information.
- Please give us your user name on the cluster.
Put enough details in the details section.
- Please give us the exact commands you type into your console.
- What are the symptoms/is the error message
Never put your password into the ticket. In the case that you handle person-related data of patients/study participants, never write any of this information into the ticket or sequent email.
Please do not send us screenshot images of what you did but copy and paste the text instead.

There is more specific questions for common issues given below.

Problems Connecting to the Cluster¶

From which machine/IP do you try to connect (ifconfig on Linux/Mac, ipconfig on Windows)?
Did it work before?
What is your user name?
Please send us the output of ssh-add -l and add -vvv to the SSH command that fails for you.
What is the response of the server?

Please give us the directory that you run things in.
Please send us the submission script that you have problems with.
If the job was submitted, Slurm will give you a job ID. We will need this ID.
Please send us the output of scontrol show job <jobid> or sacct --long -j <jobid> of your job.