NS3000/iX Operations and Maintenance Reference Manual (36922-90042)

56 Chapter3
Getting Information About the Network
Logging and Tracing
Tracing Facility
Tracing is provided for the Network Services subsystem, Network
Interprocess Communication (NetIPC), the network transport
subsystem, and the link subsystems. You enable tracing for the
Network Services by the DSLINE command for each user’s services.
Network Service tracing is used to trace messages generated by your
applications. For more information, see Using NS 3000/iX Network
Services.
You enable tracing for NetIPC applications with the NetIPC intrinsic
IPCCONTROL, which is explained in the NetIPC 3000/XL Programmer’s
Reference Manual.
You can selectively enable tracing for the network transport with the
NETCONTROL command see Chapter 7 , “Commands.” You can enable
tracing at the link level in the NMMGR configuration for some links, as
explained in the NS 3000/iX Screens Reference Manual. You can also
enable link level tracing with the LINKCONTROL command.
Trace Files
Network transport trace records are written to disk files and are of file
type NTRAC. Trace files are named either by explicitly specifying a file
name (in the configuration file or with the NETCONTROL command) or by
using the default trace file filename. If you explicitly specify a file name,
the contents of the file are overwritten each time a new trace is started.
No warning is issued. If you use the default file name, NMS uses
NMTC
nnnn .PUB.SYS as a file name. In the file name, nnnn is a number
from 0000 to 9999. Each time a new trace is started, NMS opens a new
file and increments
nnnn by one, thus creating a new file name. If this
new trace file name is the name of a file that already exists, NMS
continues to increment
nnnn by one until it produces the name of a new
(non-existing) file. If the NMS trace facility reaches an end-of-file mark
while recording to a disk file, it wraps subsequent entries around to the
beginning of the file and overwrites the previous entries.
Format Log and Trace Files
You can format log and trace files into a readable format using the
NMDUMP utility. You can run NMDUMP by itself or as one of the NETTOOL
tools. See Chapter 6 , “Using NETTOOL,” for step-by-step instructions
for running NMDUMP using NETTOOL.
NMDUMP allows you to select specific subsystems and message types for
formatting. (Note that you must have configured logging so that
messages of the type you select are recorded.) For example, you may
only need to see critical error messages for a LAN link. NMDUMP will let
you select just these messages to be formatted. See Using the Node
Management Services (NMS) Utilities for a table of the logging
subsystems and message types that you can select for formatting.