Diagnostic script · SFTP Gateway Support

Overview

When troubleshooting an issue with SFTP Gateway, sometimes there is an error message that matches an article in our knowledge base, and the suggestions in the article happen to work.

At other times, it's difficult to pinpoint what is wrong. You reach out to our email support at azure-support@thorntech.com, but a lot of time is spent running exploratory commands to diagnose the issue. On top of that, SFTP users cannot access production while you wait for an email response.

This article covers how to use a diagnostic Python script. You can use this for yourself, or we may request this information in an effort to save time troubleshooting.

What does the diagnostic script do?

The diagnostic Python script gathers together information from the server, and consolidates them in a single file.

The gathered information includes:

Log files
Conf files
Command line output

There are log files and conf files that we commonly check to help diagnose issues. For example, /var/log/secure gives server-side information as to why an SFTP login is failing.

Running the diagnostic script

Make sure you are in the home directory of your Linux admin user.

cd /home/azureuser/

Download the diagnostic script.

wget https://thorntech-products.s3.amazonaws.com/sftpgwdiagnostics/1.000.00/sftpgwdiagnostics.py

Run the diagnostic script.

python sftpgwdiagnostics.py

You will see some output, which you can ignore.

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100    13  100    13    0     0   1218      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  1300

When the script is done running, you will see the following file:

sftpgw-diagnostics.tar.gz

What to do with the diagnostic script artifact

After the diagnostic script creates an artifact, you can examine it.

First, untar the artifact:

tar xzvpf sftpgw-diagnostics.tar.gz

You should see the following folder:

sftpgw-diagnostics/

In this folder, you will see log files, conf files, and files containing command output. Feel free to look around and see if there's anything related to your issue.

You may be asked by email support to provide this diagnostic artifact (sftpgw-diagnostics.tar.gz) to expedite troubleshooting. The easiest way to pull this file off the server is to connect via SFTP as the azureuser.