* Where is Novell when your system experiences an abnormal ending?
Lately we’ve been talking a lot about tools and utilities that either make your NetWare network better, or help you to correct problems – sometimes even before they occur. But sometimes it’s only after a disaster that you realize that some forensic research might help you to both understand why the problem occurred and help you to fix the environment that led to the problem.
Ever since NetWare 3, a crashed server – one that has experienced an “Abend,” an ABnormal ENDing – has had the ability to do a memory dump. That is, it could write to a file an image of what was in RAM at the time of the crash.
Frequently, Novell technical support would ask a user who had initiated a telephone service call to do a memory dump and send it in so that Novell could analyze the situation and diagnose the problem. Initially this dump had to be done to floppy diskette – you remember, those small squares of hard plastic with a thin magnetic disk inside. As server RAM increased, though, the number of disks needed grew astronomically – a server with 1G byte of RAM would require more than 850 diskettes.
In the late 1990s, Novell changed what happened when an Abend occurred and released the Abend Analysis System. When a crash occurs, NetWare would (sometimes) write out an Abend log that contained meaningful data and information about the state of the machine at the point of crashing. As a NetWare network manager, you could upload your Abend log to Novell, which would compare to known Abend issues that it had resolved. If your Abend matched a known issue for which a solution exists, Novell would e-mail the solution to you immediately. If no solution was available, Novell would add your log file to the database and reuse it along with others received that might be similar to try to identify a solution. It wasn’t ideal (at best, the success rate was less than 20%) but it did offer a better way to do a post-mortem on a server crash.
When longtime reader Al de la Torre went to the Abend Analysis Web page https://support.novell.com/abendsystem/index.html?sourceidint=suplnav4a_abend to submit a log recently, he was met by a “404: page not found” error message. A little investigation showed that it hadn’t disappeared, but had simply moved – to https://abend.novell.com/ (which does require you to register and log on). But, in asking around to find out what had happened to the system, I discovered that it will not accept logs from NetWare 6.5 SP3 systems (or Open Enterprise Server, for that matter).
But there is a glimmer of hope. According to someone close to Novell Technical Services, the Abend Analysis tool is being worked on with the intention to enhance it to work with not only NetWare 6.5, but also the SuSE Linux core from Open Enterprise Server. The recent Novell layoffs (mostly in Europe) will not affect this work, but it still isn’t a completely “done deal.” Should you happen to still have contact with Novell Sales in any way, you might start asking about this tool and program which can be – if it’s ever fully fixed – a useful tool for your network.
