Support assistance enables support personnel to access the system to complete troubleshooting and maintenance tasks. More access controls can be added to individual sessions by the system administrator. You can configure either local support assistance, where support personnel visit your site to fix problems with the system, or remote support assistance. Both local and remote support assistance uses secure connections to protect data exchange between the support center and system. More access controls can be added by the system administrator. Assistance can be provided at your location or through a remote connection to your system.
With remote support assistance, support personnel can visit on site and they can also access the system remotely through a secure connection from the support center. However, before you enable remote support assistance between the system and support, you first need to configure local support assistance. You cannot enable remote support assistance and use the Assist On-Site tool at the same time.You must ensure that call home is configured and a valid email server is specified. Call home automatically contacts support when critical errors occur on the system. Call home sends a return email that communicates information back to the system such as a Problem Management Report (PMR) number that tracks the problem until it is resolved.
In addition, a service IP address must be configured before you set up remote support assistance. During system initialization, you can optionally set up a service IP address and remote support assistance. If you did not configure a service IP address, go to to configure a service IP for each node on the system. Optionally, you need to configure a proxy server if you use a firewall to protect your internal network.
When you enable remote support assistance, a shared-token is also generated by the system and sent to the support center. If the system needs support services, support personnel can be authenticated onto the system with a challenge-response mechanism. Use the chsra command to enable remote support assistance on the system. After support personnel obtain the response code, it is entered to gain access to the system. Service personnel have three attempts to enter the correct response code. After three failed attempts, the system generates a new random challenge and support personnel must obtain a new response code.
When you enable local support assistance, support personnel are assigned either the Monitor role or the Restricted Administrator role. The Monitor role can view, collect, and monitor logs and errors to determine the solution to problems on the system. The Restricted Administrator role gives support personnel access to administrator tasks to help solve problems on the system. However, this role restricts these users from deleting volumes or pools, unmapping hosts, or creating, deleting, or changing users. Roles limit access of the assigned user to specific tasks on the system. Users with the service role can set the time and date on the system, delete dump files, add and delete nodes, apply service, and shut down the system. They can also view objects and system configuration but cannot configure, modify, or manage the system or its resources. They also cannot read user data.
Service personnel might require specific support information to analyze before they can resolve an issue. You can automatically or manually upload new support packages to the support center to help analyze and resolve errors on the system. You can generate new support packages and upload them to the support center or select specific logs from a particular time.