Hi all,

For months, I've had sporadic "hangs" of sessions on my HP9000
workstation when I'm connected via vt3k to an HP3000.  The hang seemed to
occur when I was typing control characters quickly, on the left side of
the keyboard.

Generally, when I've had such a hang, ABORTJOB didn't seem to work
on the HP3000, but NSCONTROL KILLSESS would.  So, I was happy that I could
at least get rid of the hung sessions (from MPE's viewpoint, anyway).

I finally complained once too often to Steve Cooper, and he asked me
some diagnostic questions (things I should have investigated earlier!).
After we conquered the shaky user interface of the HP-UX "top" command,
we finally found the clue that led to a solution: the hung vt3k processes
were in a "stop" state on the workstation...the same state a process is
put into when a control-Z ("suspend") is pressed during an ordinary
(non-vt3k) interaction with hpterm or xterm.

The basic problem is that stty's "susp" function defaults (or was set) to
control-Z ... coupled with a bug in vt3k/hpterm that caused a control-Z
to half suspend the connection...the vt3k was suspended, but not the
hpterm ... so I'd never get a shell prompt that would allow me to restart
the process.   And...the keyboard's "n-key rollover" is a little flaky,
and typing too quickly sometimes generates a sporadic z or control-Z!

I was connecting to the 3000 by doing:

    hpterm -e vt3k lisa &

(Generally from a VUE menu)

The solution is to change the "hpterm" invocation as follows:

   Change:  hpterm ..... -e vt3k lisa     (or whatever your HP3000 is called)
       to:  hpterm -tm "susp ^ " ...  -e vt3k lisa     (or whatever...)

The '-tm "susp ^ "'  tells hpterm to set the susp function to none ...
now, pressing control-Z has no special meaning.

BTW, if you want to duplicate the problem from an existing hpterm window,
you must do an hpterm command ending with a "&" ... otherwise the problem
doesn't seem to occur.

Anyway, I wanted to pass on the solution, since most of us know that the
reason Unix and X Windows was to provide multiple logon windows to
an HP3000 :)
and, I've heard a couple of other users comment about apparent window
hangs.

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html