All error messages begin with a percent sign, and are displayed in the
following format:
%FACILITY-SEVERITY-MNEMONIC: Message-text
FACILITY is a code, consisting of two to five uppercase
letters, indicating the facility to which the message refers. A facility may be
a hardware device, a protocol, or a module of the system software. Figure
lists the codes
for some of the system facilities.
SEVERITY is a
single-digit code from 0 to 7 that reflects the severity of the condition. The
lower the number, the more serious the situation. Figure
lists
the severity levels.
MNEMONIC is a code, consisting of
uppercase letters that uniquely identify the message.
Message-text is a text string describing the condition. This
portion of the message sometimes contains detailed information about the event
being reported, including terminal port numbers, network addresses, or
addresses that correspond to locations in the system memory address space.
Because the information in these variable fields changes from message to
message (see below), it is represented here by short strings enclosed in square
brackets ([ ]). For example, a decimal number is represented as [dec]. A
complete list of the kinds of variable fields, and the information contained in
them, appears in Figure
.
Some
example error messages could be as follows:
Error message:
%HELLO-2-NORDB: Redistributed IGRP without rdb
In
this message, HELLO is the facility, 2 is the severity, and NORDB is the
MNEMONIC. This message indicates that an internal software error has occurred.
The corrective action in this case is to contact technical support for
assistance.
Error message:
%IP-4-DUPADDR Duplicate
address [inet] on [chars], sourced by [enet]
This error
message indicates that two systems are using an identical IP address and that
it should be changed on one of the two systems.