On Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:08:11 +0000, Huge wrote:

On 2013-04-03, Andrew Gabriel wrote:

I wrote the ethernet driver for a minicomputer many decades ago. When I
got the jammed flag set (implying a shorted or open circuit cable
generating reflections on every transmit attempt), I reported the
internal TDR value recorded by the AMD LANCE chipset. It somewhat
surprises me that no other ethernet driver I ever saw reported this
most useful information.

It's all part of the "useless error message" syndrome, which started
with mainframe ABENDs and huge core dumps and culminated with Lotus
Notes reporting "There is an error. [OK]"

We had a 'home grown' operating system running on our ICL mainframe (dual
CPU, SMP, 2960) for years. Previously it had run an appallingly
unreliable ICL operating system.

The hardware wasn't great, and we had a nice reporting system whenever
there was a single bit recovered memory error. The raw information was
dumped into a log file and later analysed. Once a day it generated a
report telling the engineers of problematical memory boards, and which
chip was marginal. (the ICL system had just ignored the recovered errors
until they became multi-bit and the system crashed)

It did take a while to convince the engineers that the system actually
worked!




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