What is an abend?
A. If you’ve used NetWare for any length of time, you’ve probably seen an abend or two. “Abend” is short-form for “ABnormal END”, and it means that an NLM (or the OS itself) has done something illegal, such attempting to read from or write to a memory location owned by a different NLM. On Windows, this is commonly referred to as a GPF, or General Protection Fault. The biggest difference is that on Windows, the application that caused the GPF is shut down, while other applications and the OS itself usually keep running. On NetWare, when an NLM abends, it takes the whole operating system down with it. There are options you can set on NetWare 4 and later to allow the OS to enter a special “recovery state” when an abend occurs, to allow you to gracefully shut down other NLMs before restarting the system, or to have the system automatically restart.. You can tell when this has happened by watching the NetWare console. When an abend occurs, a message appears on the console, telling you which
