[logs] ugliest application logs ever?

[John Kinsella]

"Last message repeated" is always good, but oh, this is SO mine to win! ;)

Or, I guess I should say, thanks(?) to some of the tools I work with,
I've had to document some real beauties on our engineering wiki.  So
here are my two favorite: (I'm almost cheating - these are Java related.
Java stack traces are Teh Evil)

First - this one comes on behalf of BEA's JRockit JDK, which usually is
amazingly more wonderful to work with than Sun's, except for the
occasional cryptic error message, such as...

	ERROR: transport error 202: send failed: Success

Thank you, zen master!

And now, may I present my all-time favorite in the last several years...  

Caused by: org.dom4j.DocumentException: Error on line 1 of document  :
Content is not allowed in prolog. Nested exception: Content is not allowed in prolog.
        at org.dom4j.io.SAXReader.read(SAXReader.java:482)
        at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.doConfigure(Configuration.java:1366)
        at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.configure(Configuration.java:1310)
        at com.kliosoft....

This act of wonder is spit out by Hibernate, which in a nutshell makes
it easier to save and read back Objects from a database in Java. So,
what's the big deal?
 * In theory, the xml document in question should be named [1].
 * I'm pretty sure, nay positive, that there's no reference to PROLOG in
   my code. (Seriously...do you have to give me turtle graphics flashbacks?)
 * While the trace does show a jump point in my code, that line has
   nothing to do with xml, config files, etc.
 * If people wanted to make this error useful, it would read, quite simply
   "Please initialize the Hibernate SessionFactory before using."

John
1: Imagine me searching through the first line of all my XML files,
double checking each of them, wondering what I've changed to feel this
pain.  First time I saw this it took probably 3-4 hours to resolve.


On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 06:14:39PM -0800, Anton Chuvakin wrote:
> All,
> 
> Ah, long time - no post! :-)
> 
> I wanted to turn this into a formal contest but figured I'd poll the
> list first: what are the ugliest, most useless application logs that
> you've seen? Logs that defy log analysis, that are full of numeric
> codes not explained anywhere? Logs that don't say what they mean (and
> vice versa)? Logs that omit the most critical piece of info?
> 
> Here is my example:
> 
> |22:22:32|BTC| 7|000|DDIC        |    |R49|Communication error, CPIC
> return code 020, <application> return code 456
> 
> Why it sux: numeric codes (twice), ambiguous language, no sense of
> priority, etc.
> 
> More?
> 
> Best,
> -- 
> Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH, GCFA
>       http://www.chuvakin.org
>   http://chuvakin.blogspot.com
>     http://www.info-secure.org
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