We are not dentists, but we are here to help. (How To Ask for help. Read before Posting

Ok, I can really only speak for myself, but I suspect others feel the way I do about some of this.

People come here wanting help, as they should, however they make it very difficult on themselves by making it difficult on those of us who want to help. Getting information out of people, sometimes, is very much like pulling teeth, and it's getting kind of tiresome.

In general, the more information you can provide the easier it will be to solve your problem. If you provide as much as you can up-front, that means less time will be wasted while we ask you to post things that you probably should have posted to begin with.

Things you should post (this is by no means exhaustive and all items are implicitly "if applicable"):

0) software versions (trixbox, Asterisk, DAHDI, FreePBX, etc...)
1) a coherent summary of the problem.
2) any relevant logs.
3) relevant configuration files and/or configurations in FreePBX
4) your system stats (server hardware)
5) end point type (software phone, hardware phone, make, model, etc)
6) VoIP codecs in use
7) VoIP protocols in use
8) network topology
9) a more detailed explanation of the problem, with examples if possible
10) if there are error messages, please post the exact message.
11) a list of things you have already tried, and the results
12) (A personal request) please try to use proper spelling and grammar. I know not everyone is a native English speaker, and that's OK, but do the best you can -- it makes things much easier to read.

For example, here's a bad post:

And the same question phrased in a way that will probably get answered:

Edit: the quote tags are messed up. The quote ends above this line. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I hope you get the idea: once again, the more information you can provide in your original post, the faster your problem can be solved (probably.)

which brings us to:

If your question isn't being answered, go ahead and bump it after a reasonable amount of time. Most of us here are doing this because we want to. If we think we may be able to help we will, if we don't, we won't waste our (or your) time posting in your thread.

If you have an emergency and you need it solved right away: consider hiring a consultant. No amount of pleading is going to get someone to answer your question if there's nobody here at the moment that has any idea. I'm not saying this to be mean, by the way. If you need it solved right away and nobody's answered you in a time frame that you're comfortable with, you should hire someone.

Now let's talk about logs. Not the things you get when you cut down trees and trim off the branches, I'm talking about text files on your system that have a lot of information in them and almost always solve a problem for you.

Almost without fail the first thing I ask for is logs, and that's because nobody ever posts them. Logs can tell you a lot, but you have to know what you're looking for. For that reason: if you are a newbie and don't know what you're looking for, copy as much of a log as you are able.

There are a few logs to be concerned with as they relate to trixbox, and I'll discuss them here.

1) the CLI log. Log into a shell, type asterisk -vvvvvvvvvr (the more "v"s the better) and try the failing operation. Copy the output.

2) /var/log/asterisk/full -- same thing, locate the area where the failure is occurring and copy that.

3) rarely, things might show up in your syslog which is /var/log/messages -- don't forget to check it and see if anything about your problem is showing up in there. If it is, copy and paste that too.

4) if you are having mail issues, the default mail log is /var/log/maillog so check it out and do the same as before.

5) /var/log/httpd is where the logs about the web server live. If FreePBX is giving you a blank screen, or you're getting some error message from the web server (404, 403, 500, etc) you can check that locations various logs and see if there's a clue.

6) look in the logs. Most logs are kept in /var/log or various subdirectories of /var/log. Check to see if your particular hardware or application has a log in that area and paste the contents if applicable.

Put large logs on pastebin.ca or pastebin.com. You might want to take the time to sanitize them if they have names or numbers you don't want posted on the Internet. If you do sanitize them, please let us know. It is important.

Small log snippets can be pasted directly in the thread, but you should probably use the code tag to surround the block to make it easier to read. Logs that wrap around are difficult to read.

I'd like to introduce (I'm sure) some of you to a very useful utility called "tail." Tail by itself is usually kind of useless, you can do "tail /var/log/messages" and it will give the last few (I think the default is 5) lines from that file. You can also specify a number of lines, so "tail -10 /var/log/messages" will give the last 10 lines, which, really, isn't that helpful either. Where it really shines is when you use the -f option, which will follow the output as it's added to the file.

If you do "tail -f /some/log" you can watch things being placed into the log in real-time, which can be quite helpful. If you combine that with changing your putty options to do a bunch of lines of scrollback then you can easily copy and paste right from there.

Here's a bit on using bbcode tags to make everyones lives easier:

Tags are just words surrounded by square brackets ( [ and ] ) I can't show them in use because they'll be interpreted, but there is usually an opening tag and a closing tag. The ones you'll use are url and code, and I'll explain their use here.

First, the code tag: this is useful to post formatted text. Compare the following snippets of text, first without the code tags:

[root@piper root]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1000 979 20 0 308 373
-/+ buffers/cache: 297 702
Swap: 1027 189 837
[root@piper root]#

And now, with the code tags:

[root@piper root]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1000        979         20          0        308        373
-/+ buffers/cache:        297        702
Swap:         1027        189        837
[root@piper root]#

Notice that it is much easier to read the second, as the columns line up. The way you do that is just to copy and paste your text into the text entry box, then add [ code ] to the beginning of the block and [ /code ] to the end of the block (taking out the spaces.)

And finally, here's the url tag. As some of you may have noticed, very long urls get cut off here. That's a problem with drupal, the engine they use to run the site. That doesn't mean you can't post long urls, though. First, you can always use tinyurl.com to shorten them, but all the cool kids just use the url tags.

Another example, here's a long link:

http://www.trixbox.org/forums/vendor-moderated-forums/aastra-endp......

And here is the same url contained in a link.

You construct these by doing:

[ url=http://very.long.link.here ]some words[ /url ]

That's about it. I may add more to this post later, but if anyone else wants to add anything feel free to post in this thread.