cyberhobo

This one reared it’s ugly head yesterday, and has plagued me for some time. I have a farm of 9 computers that all use a single disk via a Network File System (NFS). During heavier use and testing I would start getting these errors from one of them, and then they would all go belly…

I see that there will have to be some criteria for my error collection so it doesn’t get clogged up with little, inconsequential errors. For instance, I got two in a row yesterday: % IDL –feed-ir IDL: Command not found % idl –feed-ir error: need file name for –feed-ir The first was caused by the…

pg_restore: [cusom archiver] unable to uncompress data: incorrect data check Once again my attempt to back up a huge database failed after 20 hours or so. This message is specific, but meaningless to me. I have to guess. Probably the archive file is not correct. Could be a bad disk, a bug in the archiver,…

pg_restore: [archiver(db)] could not execute query: ERROR: Database comments may only be applied to current database This message was waiting for me from something I left running overnight. These are the kind of errors that really make you want to scream – a process runs for hours then fails at the end for some trivial…

error: Failed dependencies: libXm.so.2 is needed by RealPlayer9-9.0.7.151-4 Clearly I had not taken enough abuse from the RealPlayer. This is a common error from the RedHat Package Manager (RPM). I found a package to install, but alas something is missing. Not too bad an error, as it makes it pretty clear I need to find…

Not at all surprising that this is error #2 in the collection. In unix-like operating systems you see this error when a program tries to access memory that doesn’t belong to it. It’s like getting the bird from a car speeding by, there’s not much you can do without going to absurd lengths. Forget whatever…

This is the first error in my collection! I’m not sure why it inspired me. It is a pretty typical error message. This specimen is of the pop-up error message variety, when you click something and get it instead of what you want. In this case I was trying to start a terminal program in…

Working with computers, things often go wrong. When creating software, things go wrong far more often than they go right. Error messages have been a way of life for me for many years. I’ve appeciated the humor in error messages, written many good and bad, and been faced with thousands. It never occurred to me…