Michael Gleason wrote in a message to Mark Kimes:

 MG> Since I know you are well versed in the BBS Biz you know
 MG> that some BBS software goes brain dead and refuses to answer
 MG> the phone (for one reason or another) but still act as
 MG> though they are working but can not talk to the modem any
 MG> longer. That would make it necessary to either kill the BBS
 MG> process and restart it OR shutdown the system and reboot it.
 MG> Since most people can not figure out how to detect a BBS
 MG> lockup, then shut it down and restart it (Me included), it
 MG> is easier to shut the system down.... I apologize if I am
 MG> telling you something that you already know but, there is a
 MG> BIG need for an OS/2 utility that could monitor the BBS and
 MG> reset automatically it if it hangs.

You have separate problems here.  By the way, I have been running a native
OS/2 Fidonet BBS system under Binkley and Maximus for a long time, and I
have never yet had a hang condition arise of the kind you describe.

1.  How to detect a BBS hang.

This is easy to do only if you are guaranteed some kind of heartbeat
behavior from the BBS program.  In many cases, such behavior is probably
going to be specific to a particular kind of BBS software.  For example,
some BBS software will poll the serial port, and other kinds might make
release timeslice calls. It would be rather easy to write a program,
ideally an OS/2 virtual device driver (VDD), that would detect the lack of
heartbeat for some period of time and kill the process.  If you have access
to the BBS source code, it would be possible to do quite elegant things,
even from a DOS program, with little additonal programming effort.

2. What do to upon detecting a BBS hang.

Under no circumstances is it reasonable to reboot the whole system.  If you
don't have the hung process killed from within the VDM by a VDD, then it
could be killed externally by some sort of monitor process which would be a
native OS/2 application.  Once the process has been killed, it is
relatively easy to detect this and restart it.

-- Mike


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