Panicking In Morse Code

An anonymous reader writes "When an i386 running Linux panics, a function in the kernel called 'panic_blink' causes the system's LEDs to blink. Andrew Rodland recently posted a creative patch to turn that steady blink into a useful message in morse code!"

Comments

This reminds me...

[Teknogeek]

...of Wolfenstein 3D.

If you translated the beeping in various levels of the third episode, it was a message in Morse Code telling you to defeat Hitler!

I can just imagine

[Alien54]

The variety of panic messages beyond the usual meaningful information

I can't do that dave

I'm melting ....

beam me up, scotty

feed me

I wonder if there is a morse code to voice coverter device out there? that would be a neat module to have to plug in as a peripheral

of course, if the code goes fast enough, you can gain the ability to recognise whole words as a sort of warble.

Re:I can just imagine

[dattaway]

Actually, this would be a good idea. The keyboard's LED, if it is red, might be close enough to the infrared spectrum to be noticed by the irda ports many notebooks have. Well, patch the keyboard panic patch with the tcp stack, write a decoder that will receive the slow tcp serial stream, and cross your fingers that portion of the kernel is not b0rked, and you can be sending packets over the keyboard link.

Well, it wouldn't be a fast link. But the possibilies could include telneting... oh I'll stop there...

Standard for diaganostics would be better

[Rob.Mathers]

Although this is a neat and creative idea, I think that a better way to diagnose a sick computer would be a standard for a set of diagnostic LEDs or even a small LCD panel as part of the next motherboard standard.
Some manufacturers of motherboards and whole systems already do this, but it's far from standard, and is typically only useful for POST errors. A full standard would allow O/Ses, as well as the BIOS to access the output device (be it LEDs or an LCD) and display a standard code for whatever the error is, which the user could then look up in the manual, or on the web.

Here is what it says...

[kenthorvath]

Three dits!

Four dits!

Two dits!

Dah!

Windows! Windows! Rah Rah Rah!

Re:Joy...

[Duckz]

I managed to grab a copy!
--
Todd

Winamp plugin

[prof187]

I donwloaded a winamp plugin that would flash the LEDs with the oscilliscope(sp). Anyway, I thought it was pretty neat untill I tried being productive with it turned on. Turns out that it actually just switches the caps/num lock on and off. So in the middle of my text, i'd Get TExt LiKE THIs. It was neat, but annoying if I planned on typing.

This IS Slashdot, right?

[jcsehak]

Just checking. I can't believe no one's mentioned the part in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon where Randy "prints" out the "message" (trying to avoid a spoiler) on his laptop's LED.

Here's an LED controller program inspired by that bit in the book.

Compaq beep of death

[peterdaly]

If I didn't know better I'd say that's what Compaq's, or was it old ALRs (remember them?) did when hardware wasn't right.

A string of varying beeps. This was years ago, don't know if any recent hardware still does it.

Tech support: Hold the phone close to the system board so I can hear it.

That was funny.

-Pete

Re:Compaq beep of death

[einhverfr]

Most BIOS's still do that when they can't start-- you can find BIOS error codes online for most computers, though the beep codes differ between models.

Nowadays, though, hardware is cheap enough that most people just start swapping out hardware when their computer does something other than the standard short beep on startup.

Now if we could patch the BIOS's to give errors in Morse code...

Re:Compaq beep of death

[Monkeyman334]

My favorite musical warning was at this ISP I used to work at. We had an old machine that we didn't really do anything with except test out peoples dial-up accounts. One day my coworker was on the phone and the machine next to him starts playing Fur Elise. He panicked and told the customer to hold while he flipped off the computer because the music was a warning that the fan had failed. I was laughing so much. What made it great was when we found microsoft knowledge base articles on it.

Undoubtedly...

[mstyne]

The kerneltrap.org server's led's are furiously flashing:

[imagine 'slashdotted' in morse here]

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

Morse != Junk! Damn you lameness filter!!

*sigh*

[ebbomega]

All your funny are belong to a year and a half ago!
Someone set up us the dead horse!
You have no chance to be funny make your time!

I would rather have a POST code type system

[frovingslosh]

This does seem somewhat bloated. The article claims it only adds a few hundred bytes, but isn't more specific. The encoding of the letters and numbers in Morse seems wasteful, but it can't be done by five bits in one byte the way Alan Cox suggested, since not all Morse characters are 5 symbols long. There would be space in a byte to store all of this information though if the remaining bits were used to store the number of encoded bits. But the real bloat comes in coding all of the potential panics anywhere they might occur. Overall I think I would prefer a system that simply passed a numeric panic number, much like the BIOS power on self test system beeps to inform a user of what failed. More limited, but reasonable for it's size. Or, if you think like Bill Gates and bloat isn't a promise but rather a blessing, then a nice text to speech system would let the computer say why it panicked.

As to the question of flashing the LED because Morse on the speaker might be too annoying, I say go for the speaker. Those who do know Morse know it by sound, not by individual dots and dashes, and seeing it on an LED is a very different thing than listening to it. If the system has panicked I'm already annoyed, beeping isn't going to be a problem. Just the opposite, if I'm nearby but not looking at the computer I want the beeping to get my attention to the problem.

And here's the really stupid question: What is this blinking system LED he's talking about???? I have a power LED on my PC, but it's not software controlled. Some PC's used to have a "turbo" LED, but that's been phased out. I sure hope he's not using the hard disk LED. Is he using a Keyboard LED or am I missing something really obvious here?

Re:I would rather have a POST code type system

[GigsVT]

num lock, cap lock, scroll lock

This was an x86 server feature

[swb]

At least on a bunch of the HP Netserver models we've used - LX Pro, LH3, LH4, etc. They seemed to have dropped it on the smaller 2U and 1U models like the 1000 and 2000 due to lack of space or something.

It's too bad there's not a standardized motherboard resource (built-in PCI device, etc)for LCD displays like this; OS and app vendors would then be able to utilize it out of the box.

The idiotic thing is the displays on our LH3s and LH4s didn't show much and were useless, even with the "interactive" buttons that let you cruise around like on a printer. If they could display system load, temperature, yadda yadda they would be be much more useful.

Of course we know the logical conclusion to LCD displays on the front of computers -- someobody will have to have a full-blown 6" color LCD display on the front of the machine...

A cool and excellent hack!

[farrellj]

Thanx to the people to worked on it...it is silliness like this that make Linux well worth the effort to learn, understand and play with!

ttyl
Farrell

backdraft

[Tablizer]

"Hey, I'm getting a message in morse code. Get my pencil, Let's see:

e r r o r - i n - m o r s e - c o d e - g e n e r z k b g h i l e r l b v c t q z

Doh!"

We need Sad Mac "chimes of death"...

[Etcetera]

One of the (many) cool things that differentiate Macs from PC's is the way the report POST failures.

Depending on if the video driver was sane or not yet, you'd get an infamous "San Mac" display, followed by a few codes in hex describing what was wrong. If not, you'd get POST-coded beeps.

What was really cool were the "chimes of death". Each Mac model family had a specific sound that played when the POST test failed. These ranged from the opening to the Twilight Zone theme, to a drum crash, to the sound of glass breaking, to a full-on car crash. (You get get some of them here, but I KNOW there's a more comprehensive list with samples out there somewhere.) :/

Ahh, memories...

Re:Follow Sun Cobalt model...

[LinuxHam]

Someone gave me a RaQ4 because his house power was too flaky and the box kept rebooting.

Well after bringing it home and reloading it from the "network gold disk" I started using it. After a short while, the box became very slow to respond. The load had gone up to 33 (yes, the O'Reilly Performance Tuning book says the load shouldn't go over 2.0 x the CPU count -- this went up to 33 on idle). It was the damn LCD control app. Once I chmodded it to -x, the load hasn't gone over 0.02 in over a year. Of course the LCD is useless now, but its better than having the whole server useless.

I brought it up to my friend (who was managing about 800 of the bastards at an ISP) and he replied, "oh, no wonder the damn things are so freaking slow".

So, lately I've been reading up on the System Installation Suite so that I can setup my own tftp server-based install of Debian. If you also anticipate Sun dropping support for these bad boys, you may want to look into it too. It would be nice to have the box feel like a normal one and who knows, maybe the lcdproc isn't such a resource hog now. Maybe the market will be flooded with them once they're abandoned, and SISuite will breathe new life into them.

OT: Cellphones do Morse!

[LinuxHam]

Way OT.. just wanted to say that I wonder how many people are aware that when their cellphones receive a text message and beep loudly with "dit-dit-dit, dah-dah, dit-dit-dit" their cellphones are actually sending "SMS" in morse code -- SMS, "SMS", get it? :)

I commute in the masses making their way to and through NYC everyday, and I must hear that four times a day on the train.