> My question is, most broadly, are we heading into totally uncharted territory? No, I have completed a scanner gun to IMAGE/SQL via MS Access/ODBC project that seems to have many similar characteristics to what you have described. This system has been running in 24 hours a day seven days a week production mode for several months. > If anyone has any advice about potential pitfalls or appropriate ways to > proceed, please share! The system I worked on is for packout stations at a manufacturing facility. Individual bar-coded products are scanned as they are placed in packaging materials just prior to shipment to customers. The scanner guns currently being used batch the information within the scanner gun (a future project will upgrade to RF technology). It is a requirement that the scanners would be able to transfer their data without the HP3000 being online. The MS Access application transfers the data from the scanners to an access database that acts as a buffer between the scanners and the IMAGE database. The MS Access application will poll an unavailable HP3000, and automatically recover when the HP3000 comes back online. We have a redundant number of PCs and scanner guns to assure continuos availability. With this system in place the largest pitfall to date seems to be with the ARPA listener. The listener will occasionally abort (about once every couple of weeks). Also the listener dose not always behave when asked to go down. Sometimes it will tell you it is down, but it will continue to keep the IMAGE database open. This behavior wreaks havoc with our automated back-ups. We are currently running MPE/iX 5.0 and I look forward to the possibility of these problems being fixed in the next release. This system needed to work with several "legacy" systems, so I did some up front investigation into record locking to prevent deadlocks. This system did not require a lot of real interaction so we could get away with buffering the data. This buffering of data has helped us from the disaster recovery stand point, and has given us a nice audit trail of the transactions. If I had a chance I would also consider adding some type of system for reporting prolonged PC to HP3000 communication outages via e-mail or raising an alert via HP OpenView Manager. I hope this information proves useful. If you have more detailed questions please do not hesitate to ask.