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Computing  Request Guidelines

When you send mail to itsupport@dpag.ox.ac.uk it gets sent to the IT staff and also recorded in a request tracking database called RT. We use this as a "to do" list of currently open jobs, as well as a long term record of the problems we have faced in the past and the way in which we have solved them.

• Please include all the relevent detail. Messages that say something non-specific like "XYZ isn't working - please help me" are likely to be met with emailed requests for clarification. You should let us know:
  • which building you are working in, your room number and your name;
  • your network username, and the hostname of the computer that you are using;
  • the date and time of the most recent occurence of the problem, and of your last successful login;
  • if it appears to be a network connection issue, the socket number of the network wall socket that you are plugged into;
  • A summary of the problem: What did you try do? What did you expect to happen? What actually happened? If you got an error message, what did it say?
  The more information you provide the more rapidly we are likely to be able to diagnose the problem and help you out. The problem might be with your network account, or something on the server or network side, rather than with your computer per-se. We are often able to fix things straight away without having to pay you a visit, or give immediate advice on how you might tackle things yourself, if you give a good description of the issue. In case we do need to find you and work though the problem in person, it would be helpful to know your normal hours of work and any restrictions on your availablity in the near future.
• Please pick a good subject line for your message, which concisely expresses the problem. The subject line gets used as the label for the request in the database; when we are consulting the database for information in the future something like "pc-xyz009 (black Dell in Rm A57) will not turn on." is going to far more useful than something like "HELP!", "Urgent!" or "Computer Broken".
• Please stick to ONE issue per message. We mark a job as "resolved" once it has been dealt with; a single email with a "laundry list" of unrelated queries can be a nuisance, as it is difficult to keep track of which parts of it have been dealt with and which parts still need to be addressed.
• Please keep the request number tag in the subject line. The tag is the part that resembles something like "[rt.dpag.ox.ac.uk #1234]". Your initial query is allocated a reference number. The automatic acknowledgement that RT sends, and all the subsequent mail that you receive from us concerning that particular request, will have this tag in the subject line. The request tracking software uses the tag in the subject to decide which part of the RT database to store the message, and will keep all the correspondence on a particular topic together.
• Please don't reuse a tagged subject line on a new request. Compose a new subject line without a tag in it, so that the system allocates you a new job number for your new query. Otherwise the new correspondence will get mixed up with the record of a previous correspondence.

Please try all the "obvious" fixes before sending a message at all. If you have a one-off problem where a PC or Mac is behaving "oddly" then try shutting down the machine and rebooting (don't do this to Unix or Linux machines without consulting us, however!). If you have a network problem of some sort check that the machine is properly plugged in to the network socket. Have someone else try to logging into your machine and try logging into a different machine - hopefully this will give some indication of whether the problem lies with the system in general, with your network account in particular, or with a particular machine.