Greetings all

We are developing an Internet site for a medical insurance company.

I have been writing a "socket server" in Cobol on a 959/400 running 5.0
I think it is "doing" things to the HP3000. Sometimes, the system
refuses to let people log on (via NS-VT), and the ftp client won't run.
To correct this, I *quickly* stop and start the network services, and
this really upsets active users :( ,but is temporarily clears things.

Without too much detail, the site is hosted on an NT 4.0 server, IIS
3.0, and we wrote a VB ActiveX control that sends and receives data from
the HP3000 Cobol socket server.

I use calls to "IX" routines in nmobj.net.sys, which I think is a
contributed library library ;) set of routines that turn uncallable
sockets type functions in C, into functions callable from Cobol.

Here is the flow of the program.

START-OF-LOOP.

        call "IXSOCKET" using   sock-descriptor-1,
                                        af-inet                                 ;=2
                                        stream,                         ;=1
                                        protocol,                       ;=6
                                        status.

        call "IXBIND" using     sock-descriptor-1,
                                port-number,
                                status.

        call "IXLISTEN" using   sock-descriptor-1,
                                status.

        call "IXLISTEN" using   sock-descriptor-1,
                                sock-descriptor-2,
                                status.

        call "IXRECEIVE" using  sock-descriptor-2,
                                message,
                                message-size,                           ;=80
                                status.

        deal with the message, format some output, then

        call "IXSEND" using     sock-descriptor-2,
                                message,
                                message-size,                           ;=xxxx
                                status.

        call "IXCLOSE" using    sock-descriptor-1,
                                status.
        call "IXCLOSE" using    sock-descriptor-2,
                                status.

        Go to START-OF-LOOP.

And that's about it.

My question for the knowledgeable socket ones, is "Am I doing something
horribly wrong?" Is the HP3000 running out sockets? How do I monitor
this?

The thing does actually work (for a random period of time), then the
networking seems to go "unstable" and in fact,
on Friday,  it halted, twice. The halt is mentioned on the hp support
web, but with "no resolution" and hp say that they have been "unable to
recreate this halt".

I can't remember who first showed me this Cobol socket stuff, but I
think it was Randy. I don't really understand the stuff, but it is so
promising, and I'm committed to getting it right. I will happily share
the stuff once it's running well.

The site is at http://bankmed.co.za and is you follow the links through
to membership enquiries, enter 1234567 as the username, and 1234 as the
password, you will see what were trying to achieve. That's if the damn
thing stays up.

All help greatly appreciated.

Neil Harvey