Troubleshooting Remotely

Sometimes you can't be at the workstation you're troubleshooting. Or you may be getting phone assistance yourself from an Apple Professional Video Support technician. In these situations, there are several tools you can use to smooth the process of long distance troubleshooting.

The first is to document your troubleshooting carefully. If you are helping another user with his or her machine, keep your questioning to objective and tangible observation. Help the user on the other end reduce the elements in his or her workstation logically until you get to the root of the problem. Use the System Profile to get an exact portrait of the hardware and software on the machine in question.

If you are a network administrator and need to regularly assist users at a distance, you might consider investing in Apple's Remote Desktop software. In addition to being able to actually see the behavior the user is experiencing, you can access his or her remote system directly.

Support Profile

Like the System Profile, the Support Profile generates a series of system reports containing nearly everything that could possibly be of use to support technicians trying to replicate the issue you are experiencing.

1.	Launch FCP and choose Help > Create Support Profile.
2.	In the Save pane, select to the Desktop and click Save. After a brief delay, a file is created on the Desktop.
3.	Navigate to the Desktop and double-click the file with the .tgz suffix. The file will automatically uncompress and generate a folder full of diagnostic records that FCP has culled from your system.

When you create a Support Profile, FCP goes under the hood of your system and makes a copy of nearly everything that could be of use to a troubleshooting detective, from crash logs and your FCP preferences to various measures of system status and performance.

This information will help you particularly during remote troubleshooting. One nice feature of the Support Profiles is that it generates the profile automatically as a small compressed file (averaging about 200K) that you can attach to an email.