Understanding Messages

VxVM is fault-tolerant and resolves most problems without system administrator intervention. If the configuration daemon (vxconfigd) recognizes the actions that are necessary, it queues up the transactions that are required. VxVM provides atomic changes of system configurations; either a transaction completes fully, or the system is left in the same state as though the transaction was never attempted. If vxconfigd is unable to recognize and fix system problems, the system administrator needs to handle the task of problem solving using the diagnostic messages that are returned from the software. The following sections describe error message numbers and the types of error message that may be seen, and provide a list of the more common errors, a detailed description of the likely cause of the problem together with suggestions for any actions that can be taken.

Messages have the following generic format:

For VERITAS Volume Manager, the product is set to VxVM. The component can be the name of a kernel module or driver such as vxdmp, a configuration daemon such as vxconfigd, or a command such as vxassist.

Messages are divided into the following types of severity in decreasing order of impact on the system:

• PANIC

A panic is a severe event as it halts a system during its normal operation. A panic message from the kernel module or from a device driver indicates a hardware problem or software inconsistency so severe that the system cannot continue. The operating system may also provide a dump of the CPU register contents and a stack trace to aid in identifying the cause of the panic. The following is an example of such a message:


VxVM vxio PANIC V-5-0-239 Object association depth overflow
• FATAL ERROR

A fatal error message from a configuration daemon, such as vxconfigd, indicates a severe problem with the operation of VxVM that prevents it from running. The following is an example of such a message:


VxVM vxconfigd FATAL ERROR V-5-0-591 Disk group bootdg: Inconsistency -- Not loaded into kernel
• ERROR

An error message from a command indicates that the requested operation cannot be performed correctly. The following is an example of such a message:


VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-5150 Insufficient number of active snapshot mirrors in snapshot_volume.
• WARNING

A warning message from the kernel indicates that a non-critical operation has failed, possibly because some resource is not available or the operation is not possible. The following is an example of such a message:


VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-55 Cannot find device number for boot_path
• NOTICE

A notice message indicates that an error has occurred that should be monitored. Shutting down the system is unnecessary, although you may need to take action to remedy the fault at a later date. The following is an example of such a message:


VxVM vxio NOTICE V-5-0-252 read error on object subdisk of mirror plex in volume volume (start offset, length length) corrected.
• INFO

An informational message does not indicate an error, and requires no action.

The unique message number consists of an alpha-numeric string that begins with the letter "V". For example, in the message number, V-5-1-3141, "V" indicates that this is a VERITAS product error message, the first numeric field (5) encodes the product (in this case, VxVM), the second field (1) represents information about the product component, and the third field (3141) is the message index. The text of the error message follows the message number.