Community Support

During setup or testing, you may have questions about how to do something, or end up in a situation where you can't seem to get a feature to work correctly. The ask.openstack.org site is available for questions and answers. When visiting the Ask site at http://ask.openstack.org, it is usually good to at least scan over recently asked questions to see if your question has already been answered. If that is not the case, then proceed to adding a new question. Be sure you give a clear, concise summary in the title and provide as much detail as possible in the description. Paste in your command output or stack traces, link to screenshots, and so on.

Posting your question or scenario to the OpenStack mailing list is a great way to get answers and insights. You can learn from and help others who may have the same scenario as you. Go to http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack to subscribe or view the archives. You may be interested in the other mailing lists for specific projects or development - these can be found on the wiki. A description of all the additional mailing lists is available at http://wiki.openstack.org/MailingLists.

The OpenStack wiki contains content on a broad range of topics, but some of it sits a bit below the surface. Fortunately, the wiki search feature is very powerful in that it can do both searches by title and by content. If you are searching for specific information, say about "networking" or "api" for nova, you can find lots of content using the search feature. More is being added all the time, so be sure to check back often. You can find the search box in the upper right hand corner of any OpenStack wiki page.

So you think you've found a bug. That's great! Seriously, it is. The OpenStack community values your setup and testing efforts and wants your feedback. To log a bug you must have a Launchpad account, so sign up at https://launchpad.net/+login if you do not already have a Launchpad ID. You can view existing bugs and report your bug in the Launchpad Bugs area. It is suggested that you first use the search facility to see if the bug you found has already been reported (or even better, already fixed). If it still seems like your bug is new or unreported then it is time to fill out a bug report.

Some tips:

The Launchpad Bugs areas are available here - :

The OpenStack community lives and breathes in the #openstack IRC channel on the Freenode network. You can come by to hang out, ask questions, or get immediate feedback for urgent and pressing issues. To get into the IRC channel you need to install an IRC client or use a browser-based client by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/. You can also use Colloquy (Mac OS X, http://colloquy.info/) or mIRC (Windows, http://www.mirc.com/) or XChat (Linux). When you are in the IRC channel and want to share code or command output, the generally accepted method is to use a Paste Bin, the OpenStack project has one at http://paste.openstack.org. Just paste your longer amounts of text or logs in the web form and you get a URL you can then paste into the channel. The OpenStack IRC channel is: #openstack on irc.freenode.net. A list of all the OpenStack-related IRC channels is at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/IRC.