The Zen of Error Messages

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Zen of Error Messages

Lum: Aug 13, 2003

I wish I'd screencapped this one, but cmd.exe on my work's Win7 x64 box just failed and told me

"Out of file handles, try increasing the FILES parameter in CONFIG.SYS"

For the youngsters: CONFIG.SYS hasn't been a thing since Windows ME, which came out in 1999 and was replaced by Windows XP in 2002.

# ? Nov 25, 2013 18:51

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# ? Apr 18, 2024 16:28

AlternateAccount: Apr 25, 2005; FYGM

Glans Dillzig posted:

But I wanted it to be special

VCards were never going to happen. Whoever decided to call them that must be the most culturally illiterate nerd in Redmond.

# ? Dec 2, 2013 20:44

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

AlternateAccount posted:

VCards were never going to happen. Whoever decided to call them that must be the most culturally illiterate nerd in Redmond.

Or maybe they knew exactly what they were doing...

# ? Dec 2, 2013 20:47

LRADIKAL: Jun 10, 2001; Fun Shoe

I was having some issues cloning a drive

# ? Dec 2, 2013 22:37

Crowley: Mar 13, 2003

Jago posted:

I was having some issues cloning a drive

If you're using Windows give Macrium Reflect a try.

Except for *nix boxes I'm using nothing but Macrium nowadays. I've even bought a license for (better) home use.

# ? Dec 3, 2013 14:39

feld: Feb 11, 2008; Out of nowhere its.....

Feldman

Ssthalar posted:

I got this error a while ago.
I have no idea why it showed up, it weren't very helpful and I haven't seen it since.

The Danish part can be translated into:
"We have sent a team of trained monkeys to fix the situation. If you see them, show them this message."

I'm pretty sure that is an error/backtrace encrypted so only the youtube engineers can read it. Sort of makes sense from a security perspective I suppose. I've pondered how I would replicate that as an Apache or Nginx module.

# ? Dec 3, 2013 14:49

Lum: Aug 13, 2003

# ? Dec 20, 2013 01:36

polynominal-c: Jan 18, 2003

You tried to throw away the recycle bin? And the universe didn't explode?

# ? Dec 20, 2013 21:33

deadly_pudding: May 13, 2009; who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off

I'm responsible for some of these in software we use internally :negative:

I've got one process that consists of a perl script that runs several other programs in sequence. Even if one of those programs errors out and derails the rest of the sequence, that perl script still gets to the end and outputs "PROCESS COMPLETED." :downs:

# ? Jan 8, 2014 17:18

Lum: Aug 13, 2003

polynominal-c posted:

You tried to throw away the recycle bin? And the universe didn't explode?

I think I must have accidentally caught the recycle bin while selecting crap to move from my desktop, but honestly I'm not sure.

And that's the point. The error message is somewhat unhelpful and cryptic.

# ? Jan 9, 2014 21:08

corgski: Feb 6, 2007; Silly goose, you're here forever.

Amusingly I just spent several minutes trying to drag the recycle bin inside itself, and every method I tried simply excluded the recycle bin from the selection or failed silently.

# ? Jan 12, 2014 02:00

omeg: Sep 3, 2012

Try creating a looped NTFS link structure :v:

# ? Jan 12, 2014 02:04

Oddhair: Mar 21, 2004

It's not an error per se but a known issue with certain SIP implementations:

Polycom VVX guide posted:

"Subnet mask forces all packets through gateway when not using DHCP and when using the wrong subnet mask for the network class in use. For example, using 192.168.X.X addresses with a 255.255.0.0 subnet mask. This issue exists in SIP 1.4.x.
Workaround: Use the correct subnet mask."

I want to believe that it's not related to the actual Class of the network, and of course that combination of IP and subnet mask would be the entire 192.168 space from RFC 1918...but it's not incorrect, either. I've been thinking about this for all of five minutes and enjoying the different ways you could describe this:

"SIP is going to suck if your subnet mask is /16 and the 17th and 18th bits of your IP are both 1!"

# ? Jan 25, 2014 00:10

Sir_Substance: Dec 13, 2013

Here's a fun one from this afternoon:

That's a 20 metre long error message. Sorry for the horrible quality, phone cam was the only one on hand.

I mucked something up in the xorg config between nvidia's settings window and the built in settings window, I think it was somehow loading the entire screen config as one of the screens. That's right, I made recursive screen settings, what now :aaaaa:

# ? Apr 7, 2014 07:52

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

Is there a vertically-oriented projector pointing at the floor in addition to the one shining on the wall?

# ? Apr 7, 2014 10:41

Sir_Substance: Dec 13, 2013

Jabor posted:

Is there a vertically-oriented projector pointing at the floor in addition to the one shining on the wall?

One on the wall plus three on the floor.

# ? Apr 7, 2014 13:46

Sepist: Dec 26, 2005; FUCK BITCHES, ROUTE PACKETS; Gravy Boat 2k

Sir_Substance posted:

One on the wall plus three on the floor.

Without context that sounds sexy

# ? Apr 7, 2014 15:49

bobua: Mar 23, 2003; I'd trade it all for just a little more.

Kinda sounds sexy anyway.

# ? Apr 7, 2014 20:18

corgski: Feb 6, 2007; Silly goose, you're here forever.

I want it in my bedroom.

# ? Apr 7, 2014 20:20

SopWATh: Jun 1, 2000

Well this is helpful...

Only registered members can see post attachments!

SopWATh fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Apr 16, 2014

# ? Apr 16, 2014 18:43

Double Punctuation: Dec 30, 2009; Ships were made for sinking;
Whiskey made for drinking;
If we were made of cellophane
We'd all get stinking drunk much faster!

SopWATh posted:

Well this is helpful...

Obviously you have to drag the buttons to the center of the screen. :colbert:

# ? Apr 17, 2014 04:58

Sulla Faex: May 14, 2010; No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING

SopWATh posted:

Well this is helpful...

I'm going to start a business that sells people Build-It-Yourself Adobe Photoshop packages for cheap. Once they pay they get a copy of python and a free book

# ? Apr 17, 2014 09:45

Woodsy Owl: Oct 27, 2004

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

I'm going to start a business that sells people Build-It-Yourself Adobe Photoshop packages for cheap. Once they pay they get a copy of python and a free book

That's basically GIMP, yeah?

# ? Apr 18, 2014 12:54

feld: Feb 11, 2008; Out of nowhere its.....

Feldman

8 DIMM slots. DIMM 11 is not compatible. What universe does this machine live in?

edit: this just happened to coincide with someone inserting a CDROM...

# ? May 2, 2014 16:56

Ataraxia: Jun 15, 2001; Champion of nothing.

That looks like a Dell R720 bios boot screen? Don't they have like 24 dimm slots?

# ? May 2, 2014 17:12

feld: Feb 11, 2008; Out of nowhere its.....

Feldman

Ataraxia posted:

That looks like a Dell R720 bios boot screen? Don't they have like 24 dimm slots?

It's a Dell 1950

# ? May 2, 2014 20:17

kastein: Aug 31, 2011; Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.

That's interesting.

Do you understand how DIMM identification works? Basically there's a small I²C serial EEPROM on each DIMM, known as the SPD EEPROM. Stands for Serial Presence Detect.

There are 3 or 4 pins on the DIMM slots that set the address of each SPD EEPROM on the bus. I think it's 3, but not sure. That gives you a maximum of 8 slots per BZ-box (memory controller.) I'm not sure how many BZ-boxes you would have on that server, what CPU family does it use and how many sockets? 2? 4?

There are also other sensors on the same bus, such as the various fan controllers and temperature sensors on the motherboard.

So I'm guessing what happened is one of the other devices on the SPD/I2C bus is conflicting with the address space normally reserved for DIMM SPD EEPROMs. The BIOS is recognizing it just enough to note that it isn't compatible (because the timing tables aren't actually timing tables, so they look like garbage) and is identifying it as DIMM 11 (which would be at the I2C address reserved for slot 0xA, since they're zero based) when it throws the error message.

It could also be a dirty connector/slot for DIMM 3 (slot 0x2) since that would mean bit 3 of the SPD EEPROM address was wrong, but the rest were right, so slot 0x2 (DIMM 3, one-based counting) is being identified incorrectly as slot 0xA (DIMM 11.)

I'd have to put a drop an XDP+ITP instance on the machine to tell you for sure, but that's where I would start looking.

# ? May 2, 2014 20:33

Caconym: Feb 12, 2013

Had a good one from a map application with input from remote gps trackers once. It would throw this

quote:

There was an unknown error in an unnamed file.

every five seconds untill you managed to get into a settings dialog, identify the offending remote unit and disconnect it, resulting in two counts of this

quote:

Unable to close connection "" from host .

So a timeout resulting in a connection being set to NULL, resulting in a nullpointer, all wrapped in unhelpful messages. That was fun to track down.

# ? May 28, 2014 14:19

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

# ? Jun 30, 2014 19:09

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

I think they've covered all the bases there

# ? Jun 30, 2014 19:48

crazyfish: Sep 19, 2002

SavageMessiah posted:

Here's the paper one I mentioned earlier:

I never did figure out what exactly caused it.

Total necro on this (3 year old post!), but I searched the thread and didn't find any mention of "paper" that was relevant. According to VMWare, it was caused by your host OS disk being full. Wound up searching this out because I was discussing bad error messages with my coworkers.

https://www.vmware.com/support/player31/doc/releasenotes_player315.html posted:

When the host disk containing the virtual machine was full, powering on the virtual machine might have failed with the following incorrect error message:
The Printer is out of paper.
The message now correctly states that the disk is full.

# ? Jul 21, 2014 23:56

Not My Leg: Nov 6, 2002; AYN RAND AKBAR!

I wish I had taken a screenshot of the error I got yesterday.

code:

ERROR

"" does not exist.

Yes No

Umm, no?

# ? Jul 22, 2014 01:24

thideras: Oct 27, 2010; Fuck you, I'm a tree.; Fun Shoe

Not My Leg posted:

I wish I had taken a screenshot of the error I got yesterday.
code:
ERROR

"" does not exist.

Yes No
Umm, no?

Seems correct to me! The error doesn't exist. Maybe it is asking you to confirm the error does not exist.

# ? Jul 22, 2014 01:28

~Coxy: Dec 9, 2003; R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD

Good old GBIS.

Happens when you try to filter a column by a particular value... but only on some columns and not others.

# ? Jul 22, 2014 04:07

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

0xDEADDEAD is my new favorite stop code.

# ? Jul 29, 2014 21:46

JnnyThndrs: May 29, 2001; HERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWELS

Inspector_666 posted:

0xDEADDEAD is my new favorite stop code.

Haven't seen that one(don't have any Intel wireless adaptors), but I'm partial to 0xDEADBEEF which occurs when I use the wrong startup flags on my Hackintosh.

# ? Jul 30, 2014 05:25

Johnny Mash: May 21, 2007; I hope to see you soon in La La Land

Do not collect $200.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 12:07

derivativ: May 29, 2006; PRESTIGE CLASS: TANTRUMANCER

Oh okay then I guess that's fine

# ? Aug 8, 2014 16:53

SavageMessiah: Jan 28, 2009; Emotionally drained and spookified; Toilet Rascal

crazyfish posted:

Total necro on this (3 year old post!), but I searched the thread and didn't find any mention of "paper" that was relevant. According to VMWare, it was caused by your host OS disk being full. Wound up searching this out because I was discussing bad error messages with my coworkers.

Haha now I have closure!

# ? Aug 8, 2014 18:57

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# ? Apr 18, 2024 16:28

President Ark: May 16, 2010

Had a pretty good one yesterday. Happened during the boot process.

code:

Keyboard failure
Press F2 to run SETUP
Press F1 to load default values and continue

I laughed pretty hard at that.

# ? Sep 3, 2014 19:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Zen of Error Messages

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