Table Of Contents

System Message Overview

Structure of System Error Messages

Sample System Error Messages

Error Message Traceback Reports

System Message Overview

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

This chapter contains the following major sections:

•Structure of System Error Messages

•Error Message Traceback Reports

Structure of System Error Messages

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
DTP	Dynamic Trunking Protocol
EBM	Ethernet bridge management
EC	EtherChannel
GBICMAN	Gigabit Interface Convertor (GBIC) manager
HWACLMAN	Hardware ACL management
HWPORTMAN	Hardware port management
IDBMAN	Interface descriptor block management
IOSACLMAN	IOS ACL management
IOSDHCPSNOOPMAN	IOS DHCP snoop management
IOSIGMPSNOOPMAN	IOS IGMP Snoop management
IOSIPROUTEMAN	IOS IP route management
IOSINTF	Catalyst 4000 IOS interface operation
IOSL2MAN	ISO Layer 2 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
PORTFANOUTASIC8X100MAN	Port fan-out ASIC 8x100 management
PORTFANOUTASIC8X1000HW	Port fan-out ASIC 8x1000 hardware
PORTFANOUTASIC8X1000MAN	Port fan-out ASIC 8x1000 management
QOS	Quality of Service
SPANTREE	Spanning Tree Protocol
SPANTREE-FAST	Spanning Tree fast convergence extensions
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.

•Message text

Message text is a text string that describes the error condition. The text string sometimes contains 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 down the problem 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.