[log in to unmask] wrote:

>A client of mine is seeing VPLUS errors that we can't explain.
>They occur on a 969 with a couple of hundred sessions and about
>20 background jobs.  The number of errors ranges from just a few
>per day to 30 or 40 per day, and they often seem to come in bunches.

Do they also seem to be related to certain physical locations, specific
DTCs or particular times of day?

>The users who get them see their transaction fail, and then they try
>the same thing again and it works fine.  If the transaction is an
>inquiry, no harm is done to the data.  If the transaction is an update,
>there is the possibility of logically-incomplete updating.
>
>Most of the errors are on VREADFIELDS, with a status code of 160.
>The last key is the ENTER key.
>The error message is
>"Internal error: Terminal read failed. (FSerr 34)"

FSerr 34 is supposed to be "Unit not on-line", but I don't know what would
generate this error (DSR or DCD missing usually generates FSerr 24).

>Another error that shows up is on VOPENTERM, where the status
>code is 2 and the error message is
>"Your terminal is not supported by VPLUS"

This probably results from garbled data arriving at the HP3000 (VOPENTERM
reads status words from the terminal/PC emulator to see whether it is
dealing with a legitimate terminal and gives this message if it doesn't
like what it sees).

>A detailed analysis has not been done, but the errors seem to occur
>more often on PC's (running Reflection) than on terminals.
>A clue is that a few of the errors which were caught and tracked
>down promptly happened to people running multiple sessions from
>multiple windows in Windows 3.1
>
You don't say what kind of communication path you are using, but I've seen
this kind of thing when there were communication errors, so I would expect
you to be using a serial connection.  Lots of possibilities, like
unshielded cables, bad connections or using serial cables over longer than
recommended distances, especially at high data rates.  However, if you are
seeing them with multiple sessions, I think it might also happen over a
network as Win 3.1 is not exactly a wonderful multitasking system.

Since these errors are probably the result of bad data transmitted to the
HP3000, you should consider the possibility of data errors occuring that do
not get caught by these mechanisms.  In that case, you may have weird
garbage on your database.

John D. Alleyn-Day
Alleyn-Day International
408-286-6421   408-286-6474 (Fax)
[log in to unmask]       http://www.Alleyn-Day.com
"You have to be in the right place at the right time
but unfortunately I was absent the day they
explained how that's done" - Herb Caen.