Date:     January 27, 1998              Time: 12:52 PM
From:     Jerry Lawson
          The Hartford Insurance Group
(860)  547-2960          jlawson AT thehartford DOT com
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We are beginning to see some problems with Prompted Schedules that are
We are beginning to see some problems with Prompted Schedules that are
causing some serious problems.  I was wondering if anyone else has seen these
problems.

First a quick review - Prompted scheduling says that the schedule prompter
will go out at the beginning of the window, and contact the clients that need
to be backed up.  He uses the last known IP address for a client.  If the
client does not respond, he posts a message, but will keep trying to
establish the session.

We have seen problems with TCP/IP 3.2 (which have been documented in the
past) with sessions that show a session being hung with some pretty
predictable characteristics.  If a Netstat command is done, the User id is
ADSM, the byte out count is 1, the byte in count is 0, the state will be
SYN-SENT, and the idle time will be a large number (hours).  Other sessions
within ADSM hang up waiting on this, especially Admin schedules.

IN researching this further, we find that the ADSM node that we are hung on
is one that is doing Prompted Scheduling, and is not available to do his
scheduled backup.  It appears that there is a fair amount of overhead
associated with these retires, and that the overhead doesn't end when the
ANR2716 message is issued, but seems to continue on - I assume for as long as
the schedule window is open.

Has anyone else encountered problems here?

I would like to see some way to stop the schedule prompter here - in some
cases the client is physically gone, but the customer wants to maintain the
backups.  The prompter meanwhile keeps trying to establish the schedule - has
been for over a year now!  :-(  I also wonder - what happens if the IP
address associated with the missing client is reassigned to another "thing"
in my network - perhaps a printer?  What happens then?

TIA



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                                                     Jerry
                                                     Jerry

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over..and expecting the results to
be different - Anon.