Table Of Contents

System Message Format

Message Structure

Facility Code

Severity Level

MNEMONIC Code

Message Text

Sample System Error Messages

Error Message Traceback Reports

System Message Format

---

This chapter describes the Cisco IOS system message structure and error message traceback report.

This chapter contains the following sections:

•Message Structure

•Error Message Traceback Reports

Message Structure

The message includes the following information:

•Facility code

•Severity level

•Mnemonic code

•Description field

System error messages are structured as follows:

FACILITY-SEVERITY-MNEMONIC: Message-text

Facility Code

The facility code consists of at least two uppercase letters that indicate the facility to which the message refers. A facility can be a hardware device, a protocol, or a module of the system software. Table 1-1 lists the system facility codes.

Table 1-1 Facility Codes 

Code	Facility
ACL	Access control list
BUFFERMANAGER	Memory buffer management
CHASSIS	Chassis
COMMONHWACLMAN	Common hardware ACL management
DOT1Xdot1x (801.x)	802.1x-related port-based authentication error messages
DTP	Dynamic Trunking Protocol
EBM	Ethernet bridge management
EC	EtherChannel
GBICMAN	Gigabit Interface Converter (GBIC) manager
HWACLMAN	Hardware ACL management
HWNETFLOWMAN	NetFlow error management
HWPORTMAN	Hardware port management
IDBMAN	Interface descriptor block management
ILC	ILC protocol error management
IOSACLMAN	IOS ACL management
IOSDHCPSNOOPMAN....	IOS DHCP snoop management
IOSIGMPSNOOPMAN	IOS IGMP snoop management
IOSINTF	Catalyst 4000 IOS interface operation
IOSIPROUTEMAN	IOS IP route management
IOSL2MAN	ISO Layer 2 management
IOSMODPORTMAN	IOS module port management
IOSSYSMAN	Catalyst 4000 IOS system management
IPROUTEMAN	Catalyst 4000 IOS IP routing management
L3HWFORWARDING	Layer 3 hardware forwarding
LINECARDMGMTPROTOCOL	Line Card Management Protocol
PKTPROCESSING	Packet processing
PM	Port manager
PORTFANOUTASIC4X1000MAN	Port fan-out ASIC 4x1000 management
PORTFANOUTASIC8X1000HW	Port fan-out ASIC 8x1000 hardware
PORTFANOUTASIC8X100MAN	Port fan-out ASIC 8x100 management
POWERSHELF	Power shelf management
QOS	Quality of Service
REDUNDANCY	Redundancy management
SERVICECARDMAN	Service card management
SPANTREE	Spanning Tree Protocol
SPANTREE_VLAN_SW	Spanning Tree VLAN switch management
STORE	Memory
SUPERVISOR	Supervisor
SW-VLAN	Switch VLAN management
SWITCHINGENGINEMAN	Switching engine management
SWITCHMANAGER	Switch management
SYSMAN	System management
UFAST	UplinkFast
WATCHDOG	Watchdog timer

Severity Level

The severity level 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. Table 1-2 lists the message severity levels.

Table 1-2 Message Severity Levels 

Severity Level	Description
0	Emergency—System is unusable
1	Alert—Immediate action required
2	Critical—Critical condition
3	Error—Error condition
4	Warning—Warning condition
5	Notification—Normal but significant condition
6	Informational—Informational message only
7	Debugging—Message that appears during debugging only

MNEMONIC Code

The MNEMONIC code uniquely identifies the error message. All mnemonics are all uppercase character strings.

Message Text

Message text is a text string that describes the error condition. The text string may contain detailed information about the event, including terminal port numbers, network addresses, or addresses that correspond to locations in the system memory address space. Because variable fields change from message to message, they are represented here by short strings enclosed in square brackets ([ ]). A decimal number, for example, is represented as [dec]. Table 1-3 lists the variable fields in messages.

Table 1-3 Representation of Variable Fields in Messages

Representation	Type of Information
[dec]	Decimal
[chars] or [char]	Character string
[hex]	Hexadecimal integer
[num]	Number

Sample System Error Messages

The following is an example of a system error message:

Error Message    LINK-2-BADVCALL: Interface [chars], undefined entry point

Some error messages also indicate the card and slot reporting the error. These error messages are structured as follows:

CARD-SEVERITY-MSG:SLOT FACILITY-SEVERITY-MNEMONIC:
Message-text

•CARD is a code that describes the type of card reporting the error.

•MSG is a mnemonic indicating that this is a message. It is always shown as MSG.

•SLOT indicates the slot number of the card reporting the error. It is shown as SLOT followed by a number (for example, SLOT5).

Error Message Traceback Reports

Some messages describe internal errors and contain traceback information, which provides the stack trace of the function calls that resulted in the message. This trace helps the engineers track the problem that is indicated in the message. You should include this information when you report a problem to your technical support representative.

The traceback report includes the following sample information:

-Process= "Exec", level= 0, pid= 17

-Traceback= 1A82 1AB4 6378 A072 1054 1860

The numbers printed above indicate which lines of code caused the message to occur.