John Plocher writes: > James Carlson wrote: > > That's exactly the point. Nobody has promised to provide anything > > other than human (English only!) readable messages here. The contents > > of the messages are no kind of programming interface. They're not > > documented anywhere. > > A quick search of docs.sun.com found several places where we > document these kinds of messages. I'm sure that there are others > on bigadmin as well...
I was somehow led to believe that man pages define the stable interfaces on Solaris -- not admin guides, not bigadmin entries, and not blogs. > > If the Ethernet cable is plugged in, find out whether or not > > the Ethernet hub does a link integrity test. Then become > > superuser to check and possibly set the machine's NVRAM. If > > the hub's link integrity test is disabled, set this variable TPE? Is that the Solaris name for SQE? What a blast from the past. In any event, this part: > > # eeprom | grep tpe > > tpe-link-test?=true ... is wholly irrelevant. Doesn't exist on modern platforms. The newest one I can find that has this is an old Ultra 2. Good luck to anyone trying to rely on that. > > Programs that depend on them are engaging in hackery. > > I am not talking about programs that depend on these interfaces, > but humans who need this information themselves. We have trained > them over the years to look in syslog for this type of debugging > information. That part I agree with. But you were bringing up log-grovelling applications as a reason for keeping this data intact and for asserting that it's some sort of stable interface. > > That's exactly what this case is attempting to accomplish. The first > > step is getting those logging messages into the framework where (if > > they exist at all) they belong. > > I'd agree with all you have said, with the addition of > ... without losing the useful information already provided by > some of the drivers. Garrett's latest offer appears to do that. I'm not at all comfortable with it (I'd rather see the messages just plain torched), but it seems like a decent compromise. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
