Hi all, I'm a system administrator at a company with a large number of machines at remote locations. Naturally, many of these machines develop hardware problems, and some may be deployed with SCSI connections that aren't so connected after all. I'm wondering if there is any documentation which can explain how to interpret the error messages which the kernel reports, for those of us who are mere mortals (i.e. neither experienced Linux kernel developers nor SCSI gods). The messages reported are pretty much unintelligible to those of us who didn't major in SCSI in college. :) Actually I pinged some people recently who have done kernel development professionally, and the response was generally that even with the source code in front of you, the messages still tend to be a bit cryptic... So any links to relevant info would be appreciated. I'm specifically interested in identifying messages which would help differentiate the category of problems, e.g. disk failure from controller meltdown, from poor connectivity on the SCSI bus, etc. (though I can imagine that perhaps it isn't always easy to differentiate each of those in software). Having a solid clue to the real problem would save lots of time (and money) troubleshooting. I'm sure someone will suggest installing diagnostic utilities, but for various reasons that's not possible in the short term. Besides which I'd generally like to understand the kernel messages anyway, but preferably without the hundreds of hours it would take me to pour over, research, and understand the kernel code. Much as I'd love to have time to be a kernel hacker, I just don't. I'm also wondering if there is any plan to make the kernel messages more generally intelligible to us common folk. If there isn't, I'd like to suggest it as a future feature enhancement. :) Thanks much! -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
