<<We have been experiencing a problem about once every month or two where
an operator enters an incomplete console command.  This can be anything
from accidently hitting the space bar or any key and then not hitting the
return key to just not finishing a command with return.  We have
installed a patch on all of our systems (we have about 70 HP3ks in our
shop) which keep the systems from crashing when the console buffer fills
up.  However, we do not currently have any way to notify the operators
that the console buffer is full.  This causes the system performance to
degrade to the point where a job which normally completes in 1 minute can
run for hours.  We are using OpC to monitor our systems and have many
redundant checks built into the monitoring process, but we have not been
able to come up with a way to notify the operators of this problem.  We
are currently using 5 HP ux workstations to monitor about 70 HP3k's and
about 100 HP9k's using OpC.
 
So my question is, does anyone know of any way to send console buffer
full messages directly to OpC, or close the current console buffer when
it reaches a certain limit, say 75%, and issue a console message that
could be trapped by OpC and generate an alarm.  Sorry for the looong
sentence.  This problem seems to always happen during critical customer
times.>>
 
We use the "quick hack" method: in a command file executed by a
system-wide UDC, we have
 
COMMENT*************************************************************
COMMENT  Ensure console has an active read timeout
COMMENT*************************************************************
IF HPLDEVIN = HPCONSOLE
  SETVAR HPTIMEOUT 20
ENDIF
 
The obvious limitations on this are that it only works well if your
console is not normally in use (ours isn't), and won't work if someone
takes the console to another device. But, for unattended systems like
ours, it helps save us from ourselves.
 
Steve Dirickson         WestWin Consulting
(360) 598-6111  [log in to unmask]