Re: Client-side information gathering tool

["J. Hellenthal via NANOG" <nanog () nanog org>]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 11:30:23AM -0500, Matt Harris wrote:
>    Hey folks,
>    I was hoping maybe someone could point me in a useful direction here. I'm
>    looking into software tools (ideally, they'd support Windows, Mac, and
>    Linux, though Windows is perhaps the only critical one) that can be sent
>    over to random users with varying (mostly very little) knowledge of how
>    the internet works to gather a bunch of data that they can then provide to
>    us to help identify connectivity issues between the client and a chosen
>    endpoint. IPv4 and IPv6 support are requirements. I've got a lot of
>    clients with VPN connections of varying sorts running on internet
>    connections of often very low quality, and sometimes even in places where
>    reasonable quality doesn't seem to even exist. 
>    Right now, when these users complain, this often means my support folks
>    get to walk them through downloading winmtr and running that as well as
>    other command line tools to gather a bunch of other information about
>    their computer, its connection to their LAN, their LAN configuration as
>    best as we can tell, and their connection to the greater internet. This is
>    somewhat cumbersome of a process though. If we could send them something
>    they could click on and then copy/paste out of or otherwise direct the
>    data to us, that would save a fair bit of time and also be a lot less
>    patience-grating on the part of our clients. 
>    Any links to potentially useful tools (commercial or free are both fine)
>    would be appreciated. The main goal is getting lots of relevant
>    information to us without having to walk an end-user through lots of steps
>    to do so. The more relevant data, the better. 
>    Thanks,
>    Matt
>
>     Matt Harris​ | Infrastructure Lead Engineer     
>     816‑256‑5446 | Direct                           
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Since noone else has replied here.

Good to hear from you and thank you for posting something that may be
useful to some others that lurk in the future.

Personally to answer on only my behalf and a few others (mainly corss),
scriptinng your solutions and distributing thhose baseics through
whatever meanns to each provisioned host can go a long way.

e.g.    Winderz: \.Bin or \.Support [hidden depending on how much you.
        macOS: somewhere suitable to where you want to store them.
        Linux: ... (same)

Write the output to a file and open it with the appropriate editor ask
user to hit Ctrl+A & Ctrl+C or the equivelant on other OS's and paste
the contents to you. Form a script to automatically submit it to a
ticket system ?


Ofcourse you could go ansible/salt/etc... and make every user/client cooperate .


If you look for specifics then take advantage of your ability to
provision or package.


-- 
The fact that there's a Highway to Hell but only a Stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic volume.

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