Comments on: NET helpmsg

By: Jason Burns - IT Superhero

Jason Burns - IT Superhero — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:06:53 +0000

[...] and serviceabilty Justin had some interesting comments on serviceability and error messages: http://tinfoilsoldier.com/blog/2007/11/02/net-helpmsg/ I run into this crap CONSTANTLY day after day trying to figure out what a certain error message [...]

By: Jason Burns - IT Superhero

Jason Burns - IT Superhero — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:06:38 +0000

Error messages and serviceabilty…

Justin had some interesting comments on serviceability and error messages:

http://tinfoilsoldier.com/blog/2007/11/02/net-helpmsg/

I run into this crap CONSTANTLY day after day trying to figure out what a certain error message means. Turns out it…

By: justin

justin — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:30:40 +0000

1603 : the worst error message ever. It means “Fatal Error”

Almost all error messages are fatal, so this is about the least helpful of ALL messages ever given.

Recently I have been getting 1603 from McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator, and it really means “please reboot before installing this software” but instead of giving some code that means “please reboot before installing this software” it instead just says “something bad happened”

By: Burns

Burns — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:08:58 +0000

Cisco does this constantly in our traces and errors. For IOS there are great online decoders for the error messages but for the voice software you’re mostly left with Google.

In our case it’s usually a performance problem. Lets say we want to print an IP in decimal and the program has it stored different ways for different functions. Sometimes reverse hex, sometimes forward hex. Every time we print an IP in a trace line we’d have to go through the code to print it from one data type to the next. You would say negligible impact, but think about an app like ours that can write 10000 trace lines every 20 seconds.

Working on serviceability is a hard and thankless job. I’ve been on it for two years and make progress where I can.. but you can’t win them all.

But anyway.. I definitely agree that needing a “secret decoder ring” makes products unusable from a serviceability standpoint.

By: John R. Durant

John R. Durant — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:10:39 +0000

I’m glad to see you are as politely annoyed as I am about this! At Microsoft developers have always had a huge influence on the user experience and interface design. I’m wondering how different things would look and how differently they would function if more UX designers and graphic artists had the largest influence, tempered by other influences such as developers, tester, and project managers. I think that cryptic things like this would far less frequent.
It’s an area where we can improve, I think. Thanks for your helpful post.