Gnarly Error Messages

Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."

Comments

Re:SGI message - has anybody else had this?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I hate to ruin a perfectly good story, but what you saw was probably "DOUBLE PANIC."

If an SGI box kernel panics, it does exactly what you described, printing the message "KERNEL PANIC" at the top of the textport and spewing out lots of stack traces after it.

Now, kernel panics are, of course, handled by a handler. (Those panic messages don't happen by magic, you know.) If, on the off chance, your machine should panic, and then panic again inside the panic handler-- apart from meaning something is really, really wrong-- the system prints the message "DOUBLE PANIC" on the screen.

That's probably what you saw. I've seen this many times-- always due to faulty hardware.

Of course, I wouldn't put it past SGI to put a joke in their panic messages. This is, of course, the company that warned users in its workstation owner's guide not to "dangle the mouse by its cable or throw mouse at co-workers."

And there's always the ever-popular audiopanel -spinaltap gag. Running audiopanel with the -spinaltap flag makes the VU meters go to 11. Naturally.

Re:Keyboard error.

[smartfart]

Usually, there is an option to fix this in the bios. Normally it's on the first bios setup screen, labelled "Halt on: (list of options)" or somesuch. Tell it to keep keep silent on boot errors, and you can probably yank that keyboard.

Re:Printer on fire

[iabervon]

Reportedly, that error message is traditional, and used to be accurate. You'd get that if the printer had jammed in such a way that there was paper pressed on one side against a spinning part, generating heat and paper dust. By the time you got to the printer, it would probably have burst into flames. Of course, the printer could have broken in a less catastrophic way, but people don't tend to complain when their computer tells them their huge printer is on fire and it turns out it's merely broken. These days, of course, printers rarely burst into flames, but if there's something mysteriously wrong with the printer that's not one of the standard problems, who knows? (The message tends to come up if the kernel doesn't understand the printer status quite right)

See this linux kernel post.