Murmur/spl minus/a message generator and reporter for Unix, VMS, and VxWorks

Murmur is a Unix based message generation, reporting, display and logging system that we have developed for use in data acquisition systems at Fermilab. Murmur is a tool for the production and management of message reporting. Its usefulness ranges from software product development and maintenance to system level shakedown and diagnostics. Murmur provides a VMS MESSAGE-like function code generation utility, a client routine package for sending these codes over the network to a central server, and a server which translates the codes into meaningful visual information, writes the information to a logfile, and displays it on B&W or color X windows. Because Murmur stores message information in keyed access files, it can provide advanced features such as popping up help when a displayed message is clicked on by the mouse and executing "action" shell scripts when selected messages are received by the server. We describe Murmur and some recent additions to its functionality. >