"But I AM the Administrator!"

Originally published on Lori MacVittie's Storage Blog

When I started testing one of the products for our ESB (enterprise service bus) roundup, it wasn't responding as expected. So I removed the extra message logging I had put in while building an orchestration and restarted the test.

But it still wasn't responding. What was this? 2,095 active BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) processes? Hmmm, I should just be able to push the delete button and the processes will go away.

Then I saw a Java exception on the console. It said: "Contact your system administrator." I am the system admin, and I can assure you I had no idea what this generic exception was trying to say. So I checked the log for more info. It had a stack trace and another copy of the message thrown on the console. Nice, but why was this exception thrown? Privileges? The manager not responding? Solar flares? Magnetized shoes?!?

Note to vendors: A general exception error with no clue as to what really happened is less useful than saying, "Yo, that didn't work!" Ya gotta give me something more to go on, people! Please?