Job Aborts: What To Do

The first thing we need to establish when learning that a customer is suffering from job aborts is whether there are specific problems limited to specific programs, or whether all programs are bombing out in various ways.

If the latter is the case, we must regretfully blame the hardware. Suppose, for example, a customer whose system has been stable suddenly starts producing memory protection errors running TSKMON, LOGON, or other programs which are highly stable and were working fine until recently. This sort of thing happens when there are memory problems. We have some on line advice about memory problems which you might want to have a look at.

If you have a specific program that is abnormally terminating, the next question we've got to ask is "is this a program written by S&H?". We won't refuse to look at memory protection errors and other job aborts in third party programs, but you probably need to talk to us about it and see if we can help. If it's a DOS 16 bit application, it might have a problem with the way that TSX emulates the DOS environment. If it's some third party .EXP (32 bit) program, we will probably want you to contact the author and have them contact us for guidance on how to debug their code.

Now we come to regular job aborts in programs written by S&H. There are three ways we can deal with this problem:

• It may be that you can figure out what it is that makes the program abort and just tell us. You might say something like "when I try to word wrap a paragraph in E32 that's over 1000 lines long I get an abort" or "KMON gives me an error message when I use the SHOW NODES command". These are the sorts of things we are easily able to reproduce in house, and can usually fix with similar ease.
  
• The program may be producing a job dump file when it aborts. Most of the components of TSX-Online ask TSX to produce a dump file if they abnormally terminate. If this is the case, by all means send us the dump file and we will be happy to have a look at it. Here is a link to more information about job dump files if you need to know how to find them or how to force one.
• We can run programs under the debugger while logged onto your system and step it, line by line, with our source code to the program at hand, and figure out what the problem is this way. This is more painful for everybody than the first approach, but if the first two approaches don't help it might come to that.