<<Has ANYONE been able to get DTC Management AND polling to work?
 
<<I have spent the better part of a week trying to get it to work.  I
started
<<on a relatively clean 486 machine, 8Mb RAM, 3Com network card.  Since I'd
<<already learned polling wouldn't work on RNS/Windows stack, I installed
the
<<included FTP's PC/TCP stack.  In somewhat of a hurry I installed it with
<<the packet driver option [hold that thought].  OpenView installed
cleanly,
<<and I fired it up to "play" a little.  Polling worked, autodiscovery
worked,
<<IPX worked, everything great and wonderful, neat new toy, maybe the DTC
<<Manager PC can provide some useful information now...
 
<<Installed DTC Manager.  Bzzzzzttt.  Wrong, PCMPDRV requires an NDIS
stack.
<<OK, drop back and punt, re-install FTP's stuff, it won't bind.  Fight
around
<<with protocol.ini, autoexec.bat, config.sys until everything's back in
order
<<and FINALLY get everything to bind cleanly and get the OMP Module to load
<<properly when starting DTCMGR.  Whew... ooops, now OpenView says polling
is
<<not supported on this stack, NETMON initialize failure, blah, blah.
 
<<PLEEEEEZE don't tell me you can have polling OR DTC Manager but not
both(?)
<<I'm tired, I'm aggravated, I'm cursing, it's 5:00 PM, it's Friday, I'm
<<outta here...
 
We first installed OV7.2, DTCMGR14.2, FTP back in January. Yes, we too
discovered  that you MUST choose NDIS option. Anyway, everything seemed to
go okay, including polling, except for one small problem. Our DTC's kept
failing about once daily. How's that for passive monitoring? After about 10
days, we reverted back to the previos OV workstation setup - dtcmgr 12.1,
ov a.04.00, etc, where things had worked just fine all along. Of course,
the poling option was unavailable in that release, so maybe these failures
were happening all along - we just didn't know about them. Actually, that
couldn't be true because our users sure would have known about them, as
they did in January.
 
PICS tried to help, but no joy. Eventually, we decided to try one more
time. Enabled our new setup, but this time we modified some configuration
parameters on both the HP3000 host with NMMGR,  and DTC configurations with
DTCMGR. We modified the parameters associated with AFCP and TCP timers -
changing from the default set 1 to set 2 - which indicates heavier lan
traffic and so presumeably makes certain internal adjustments to accomodate
this reality.
 
We have been up now for over one month and have not experienced a REAL DTC
failure yet. I say real because we still occasionally see the red alarm
INDICATING a serious failure. Examination of the alarm event screen indeed
shows a red line indicating DTC failure, as well as a green line indicating
recovery. In fact, we believe in each case  there was no failure, only that
somehow an "are you there?" polling question did not get answered in time.
In January, our users did complain of real failures - which were usually
indicated by only a red alarm line with no corresponding green line, or a
red and green line separated by time stamps greater than 2 minutes. The
imaginary failures always have matching pairs of red and green events,
separated by no more that 100 seconds.
 
During recent experiments, we replaced the FTP stack with WRQ's
3000connection stack. Even though we saw the message "polling is not
supported on this stack" it actually was successfully occuring. We tested
this theory by intentionally powering off a DTC. Sure enough, it's icon
turned red, followed by a DTC download indication arrow and green icon
after subsequent powering on of DTC.
 
We also were able to successfully use Reflection's VT-MGR connection with
both stacks. In the case of the FTP stack, all we needed was the WRQ Nsopen
for Windows product to provide the TCP/AFCP translation.
 
So, to cut to the chase - yes we can have our cake and eat it too. The new
DTCMGR does seem to work, polling et all, although I still get a bit
nervous seeing those red (false) alarms once a week or so.
 
******************************
Gilles Schipper
GSA Inc.
Tel: 905/889-3000
Fax: 905/889-3001
******************************