Helpful Hints For Asking Questions or Reporting Problems¶

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

A Good Request¶

Write a descriptive summary.
- Put in a short summary into the Subject.
- Which cluster are you on? We support two -- JHPCE and C-SUB. We assume JHPCE but specify "C-SUB" if that is where you are working.
Expand on this in a first paragraph. Try to answer the following questions:
- Please give us your user name on the cluster.
- What are you trying to achieve?
- When did the problem start?
- Did it work before or is this the first time you are trying to do this?
- Which steps did you attempt to achieve this?
Additional advice:
- Put enough details in the details section.
- Send us screenshot images of what you did -- often we can notice little details you might not have thought to mention.
- Please give us the exact commands you type into your console.
- What are the symptoms/is the error message
- Have you tried to google for 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 subsequent email.

From which machine/IP do you try to connect (ifconfig on Linux/Mac, ipconfig on Windows)?
Did it work before?
What is your cluster user name? This is NOT your JHED ID.
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?