Troubleshooting guide

Rev. 1.0
- 6 -
• you must be in a terminal window and at the prompt type, “ping” and then
the machine IP or hostname such as:
#ping machine_name
#ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
• you should get data packets sent to the other machine
• if it says that there is “no route to host” or just times out and does nothing,
then you aren’t “pinging” the machine
Who am I?
• The “whoami” command shows what you are logged in as
• The “uname –a” command will also show what the host computer is
Where am I?
• To show where you are in the file system type: “pwd” at the prompt and it
will name the file path you are in
• List files within a directory type “ls”. And to be able to scroll through the file
list type “ls |more” and you will see files on the left side of the terminal
window and you can space bar down the list
• To list files with permissions type, “ls –al”
• To change directories type, “cd” and then the directory : #cd /etc
• You have to go in order, you can’t skip up or down directories
• To go up directories type, “cd ..”
The man command:
• type “man” and then the command in question to get help for specific
commands
• example: #man fsck
• this will give you a detailed description and usages of the command and
related commands