1.2 About This Technical Note

This document covers Sun Java System Directory Server 5 on all supported platforms.

You can use this document in all types of environments, including test, pre-production, and production. Verbose debugging is not used so as to avoid performance impact, except when it is deemed necessary. In some cases, it is possible that the problem could disappear when you configure logging for debug mode. However, this is the minimum to understand the problem. In the majority of cases, the debug data described in this document is sufficient to analyze the problem.

This document does not provide workarounds nor techniques or tools to analyze debug data. It provides some troubleshooting, but you should not use this guide as an approach to troubleshooting Directory Server problems.

If your problem does not conveniently fit into any of the specific categories, supply the general information described in To Collect Required Debug Data For Any Directory Server Problem and clearly explain your problem.

If the information you initially provide is not sufficient to find the root cause of the problem, Sun will ask for more details, as needed.

1.2.1 Prerequisites for Collecting Directory Server Debug Data

The prerequisites for collecting debug data for Directory Server are as follows.

• Make sure you have superuser privileges.

• For the Solaris OS platform obtain the dirtracer and pkg_app scripts from the following location.

  http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/scripts/indexSjs.html

  See To Run the pkg_app Script for instructions on using pkg_app. See the documentation bundled with dirtracer for information on using that script.

• On the Windows platform, download the free Debugging Tools for Windows to help in analyzing process hang problems. The debugger Dr. Watson is not useful for process hang problems because it cannot generate a crash dump on a running process. Download the free Debugging Tools from the following location.

  http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx

  Install the last version of Debugging Tools and the OS Symbols for your version of Windows. Also, you must add the environment variable NT_SYMBOL_PATH.

  Use the command drwtsn32 -i to select Dr. Watson as the default debugger. Use the command drwtsn32, check all options, and choose the path for crash dumps.

1.2.2 Variables Used in This Technical Note

The following describes the variables used in the procedures in this document. Gather the values of the variables if you don't already know them before you try to do the procedures.

server-root

The base file system location for Directory Server or Directory Server.

win-dbg-root

The base file system location for Windows Debugging Tools.

Many paths specified in this document use the forward slash format of UNIX. If you are running software on a Windows system, use the equivalent backslash format.