What is ERRFMT in Open VMS?

[Alanjones_1]

Dear friends,

what is ERRFMT in Open VMS? If any link...

Regards
balamurali

[Hein van den Heuvel]

It the system error format process.

Started after boot with SYS$STARTUP:VMS$CONFIG-050_ERRFMT.COM

Writes binary log files like into SYS$ERRORLOG

RTFM?
Google?

hth,
Hein.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

From the (VAX) internals guide :

At startup it recuperates error log allocation buffers from the dump file and write it to sys$errorlog:errlog.sys.

Further it logs all the device and other errors such as memory errors, machine events such as cold start, (dis)mounts, timestamps and user messages (via system calls).

Wim

[Ian Miller.]

From
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/82FINAL/aa-pv5nj-tk/00/00/71-con.html#errorformatterdescription

The ERRFMT process, which starts when the system is booted, periodically empties error log buffers, transforms the descriptions of errors into standard formats, and stores formatted information in an error log file on the system disk. (See Maintaining Error Log Files http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/82FINAL/aa-pv5nj-tk/00/00/72-con.html#monitor-2
)

The Error Formatter allows you to send mail to the SYSTEM account or another user if the ERRFMT process encounters a fatal error and deletes itself. (See Using ERRFMT to Send Mail. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/82FINAL/aa-pv5nj-tk/00/00/72-con.html#errfmt-mail
)

[Chinraj Rajasekaran]

Murali,

I think, simply we can say If you want details from the Errorlog.sys if anything happned to your system (particularly hardware related errors) then ERRFMT process should be running to report the errors.


regards
Raj

[Volker Halle]

Raj,

ERRFMT is the OpenVMS process, which gets the reported errors from memory and writes them to SYS$ERRRLOG:ERRLOG.SYS. Drivers and other OpenVMS components write errors into memory buffers only.

If ERRFMT would not be running, there would be nothing in ERRLOG.SYS

Analyzing the contents of ERRLOG.SYS on OpenVMS Alpha is another story. You need ANAL/ERR/ELV (from V7.3-2 onwards) or DECevent (DIAGNOSE) or SEA (System Event Analyzer, a component of WEBES).

Volker.