You are CORRECT in that assumption sir!  I appreciate that.

The solution to the problem however, was more operational.

The FTP recipient (PC based) has been preconfigured.  So the assumption
is:

1.  If the receiving system is up and running, FTP service will be
running also.

2.  If the receiving system is down or can't be reached, FTP will also
be down.

Note: OPERATIONALLY in our environment number 2 above (hardware or comms
provider failure,) is quite freqent.

3.  Only in a very rare instance (an occurance I have not yet
encountered in our environment in 5 years,) will the receiving system be
up, and FTP be down.

Why?  Because it takes a conscious effort, (such as human intervention)
to deconfigure FTP or turn it off on the receiving system while it is
up.  Therefore, if FTP on the receiving system was mysteriously turned
off, yet the receiver was up, any FTP attempt would (probababy, I
haven't tried it,) get a different response, such as a "connection
refused", or "service unavailable" thus eliciting an detectable error on
the sending machine, thus allowing our FTP jobs to abort.  As opposed
the existing problem I had, which was no response at all, thus causing
my FTP job streams to hang until the HP3000 was rebooted.

(Also recall in a prior message, setting FTP TIMEOUT does not work,
prior to getting a connection.)

End result is, a simple script in my job stream detecting if the
recipient can be pinged, allows me to nest the FTP command between an IF
and ENDIF statement, preventing a hung job.

Tracy Johnson
Measurement Specialties, Inc. 

BT







NNNN


> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion 
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Bawden
> Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 8:19 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Checking for FTP Success
> 
> 
> My ignorance may show here and please correct me if
> I'm wrong but, does the fact that a ping is successful 
> guarantee that a subsequent FTP will be successful? Doesn't 
> the ftp service on the system have to be running to have the 
> ftp open command succeed? My assumption with ping has always 
> been that it checks to see if there is electrically active 
> hardware but doesn't guarantee that a user process can 
> actually connect to a remote machine. Can anyone more 
> knowledgeable weigh in.
> 
> P.S. EXCELLENT script Donna!
> --- Donna Hofmeister <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> 
> > fwiw, there are/should be several 'nslookup's to
> > pick from.  a listfile of [log in to unmask] revealed 3
> > on my system.  if you have bind installed, you'll
> > find one there as well.
> > 
> > you might want to take a look at this script.  we
> > had a similar situation where we wanted to be sure
> > what we were about to ftp to was actually alive.
> > the variabled 'answered_ping' needs to be checked
> > after the script is run:
> > 
> > parm addr=?
> > if "!addr" = "?" or dwns("!addr") = "help"
> >   echo
> >   echo ![basename(hpfile)] [node name|ip address]
> >   echo                   req.
> >   echo This script will ping the provided
> > network-attached device
> >   echo and return the CI boolean variable
> > ANSWERED_PING.
> >   echo
> >   return
> > endif
> > setvar _pt_addr               "!addr"
> > if not numeric(word(_pt_addr,"."))
> >   mylookup !_pt_addr
> >   if bound (ml_ip2)
> >     setvar _pt_addr2          ml_ip2
> >   else
> >     setvar pt_err "ERROR: Couldn't convert !_pt_addr
> > to an ip address"
> >     echo !pt_err
> >     escape 99
> >   endif
> > else
> >   setvar _pt_addr2            _pt_addr
> > endif
> > file pingout=po!hppin,old;dev=disc
> > if not finfo("*PINGOUT","EXISTS")
> >   build po!hppin;rec=-1,,b,ascii
> > endif
> > continue
> > larsping.net.sys "!_pt_addr2,3,64" > *pingout
> > setvar answered_ping          true
> > grep.hpbin.sys "' 0 % packet loss' PO!HPPIN" >$null
> > if cjcw <> 0
> >   setvar answered_ping        false
> >   echo ********************
> >   print *pingout;page=0
> >   echo ********************
> > endif
> > deletevar _pt@
> > reset pingout
> > purge po!hppin
> > 
> > a couple of notes...  if you want 'mylookup', please
> > let me know privately.  it's a wrapper for nslookup.
> >  larsping (gee, where'd we get *that* name :-) is
> > the special version of ping available on jazz that
> > doesn't require any special capabilities to use.    
> >   - d
> > 
> > ----
> > Donna Hofmeister, HP-CSA Sr. System Programmer
> > dgarverick -at- longs -dot- com
> > 925-210-6631 Longs Drug Stores
> > 
> > >>>MY opinions, not Longs Drug Stores'<<<
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> John Bawden
> Homestead3000 Consulting
> [log in to unmask]
> 
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