Michael Gleason wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 MG> I am fearing that I am again straying off topic but if I
 MG> could convince someone to program this type of utility it
 MG> would be worth it. I have tried and failed at it.....

It would be up to the moderator officially, of course, but it is my opinion
that you have touched on an important programming subject where OS/2 has
unique considerations: whether or not to reboot the whole machine when a
process hangs, or just kill and restart the process.

 MG> I have ran only a couple of OS/2 native BBS packages but the
 MG> easiest one to get this type of hang with is VBBS (I have
 MG> been testing to see if I could write a utility to kill the
 MG> BBS and restart it).

Killing the BBS and restarting it is fairly easy.  You can even write a
simple script to do this using commonly available tools ported from Unix,
such as ps, grep, and kill -- all of which are available as part of the
AIXLIKE package that is distributed as IBM EWS freeware.  As I said
originally, detecting the BBS hang is the hard part.

 MG> But I am again way over my head here so let me say this in
 MG> closing this thread.....
 MG> There is a use for a utility program that would do like
 MG> phonev4 or watchkat does for DOS but on the process level
 MG> instead of system level. I have tried to program it but I am
 MG> too new at C++ to make it work and when I saw this thread I
 MG> wanted to make it known that there is a need.

It is hard to come up with a way to detect a BBS hang reliably unless you
have access to the BBS source code.  A DOS BBS under OS/2, believe it or
not, is probably easier to test.  A native OS/2 BBS might legitimately do
an I/O call and block indefinitely, waiting for the phone to ring or
whatever, and this state might well be indistinguishable from a hang.

I suppose a good indication of a hang might be to hook in a character
device monitor on the serial port and look for unanswered ringing.  How to
write a character device monitor is covered in the OS/2 Control Program
Reference.
 
-- Mike


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