SUBMITTING PROBLEM REPORTS

[Fish-Git]

How to Ask for Help

Introduction

When filing a problem report it is never harmful to provide more information than needed, but is almost always harmful to not provide enough information.

If your problem report does not provide enough information many people will not bother to even respond as they consider it a waste of time to ask for information which should have been provided in the original problem report.

Help others to help you!

Try to provide as much information as possible when filing problem reports!

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Details

Before You Ask:

1. If your problem is networking related, and are using a third party product to provide needed Hercules functionality (such as SDL's "CTCI-WIN" product), have you consulted the provided "Help" file that comes with the product? For example, did you perform a multi-directional Ping Test as part of your troubleshooting? If you did, you should probably provide that output in your problem report.

Be precise and informative about your problem:

2. The specific version of Hercules you are using (i.e. the output of the Hercules version command).
   
   The reported version string should look like this:

        HHC01413I Hercules version 4.3.0.10296-SDL-ga4db8213 (4.3.0.10296)

   The ga4db8213 portion of the version string is the most important. If your version string only displays a generic "4.3.0.0" version string, then your Hercules was built wrong and you should rebuild it.

3. Your complete Hercules configuration file.

4. Your complete Hercules log file.   (VERY important!)

5. What guest operating system and release level are you running under Hercules? VM? MVS? z/VM? z/OS? Other?

6. Your complete TCPIP.PROFILE dataset if your problem is networking related.

7. Which host operating system platform are you using? (Windows? Linux? Mac?) Which version is it? Windows 10? Windows 11? CentOS 6.8? Kubuntu 21.10? Is it 32-bit or 64-bit?

8. Is the problem consistent and repeatable? What procedure can others use to try and re-create your problem?

9. Is there anything else you can think of that might be related to your problem? Do you have any unusual or related software installed on your host? Have you made any recent configuration changes to your host?

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Closing Remarks

If you provide a quality problem report with the information others need to help you, you will stand a much better chance of actually obtaining the quality help you seek.

Remember: the people you are asking are not psychic. They don't know the details of your problem. Only you know that.

If you provide them with the details they need to help you, they might actually be willing and able to help you.

Otherwise you're just wasting their time.

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[Fish-Git]

I can't remember whether closing this issue unpins it or not, but I guess since technically it's not a bug/problem that needs to be resolved, it should probably be closed instead of left open. If closing it prevents it from being pinned however, I'll re-open it again.   ...   Here goes!