This software is called a trouble ticket submission system. If you send email to request@pha.jhu.edu, an entry will be made in a database and a copy of your email will be forwarded to the Computer Center administrators. They will look into the problem, possibly ask you some follow-up questions, and let you know what will happen. All mail sent to request with the right subject line will be appended to your request so everyone can be kept in the loop. At some point your request entry in the database marked as "closed" because it has been resolved one way or another.

You can use our helpdesk web interface to see the status of your ticket, and to see what other tickets we're working on. Sign into the web interface using username 'guest' and password 'helpforme' (replace the 'for' by '4').

Please, please, please give as many details about your problem as you can! It will significantly reduce the time required to resolve your query. Remember, the system administrators are not mind readers. It is likely that they are not as familiar as you are with many of the software packages, such as Mathematica or LaTeX. It will be up to you to track down problems relating to the correct usage of many such software packages by reading the documentation and by experimenting.

For example,

• On which computer did this problem occur?
• Can you reproduce the problem?
• What did you do and what did you expect to happen?
• What commands did you execute before the problem appeared?
• Have you ever been able to perform the action you were attempting succesfully? If this is the first time you are trying something, it could be that you simply didn't specify some option. If you have been able to do it before, then something has changed and we'll focus on searching for that changed element of the equation.