Another thing came up the other day. I've noticed that a few of my "beloved" users who by the way, use NVT (Novell Virtual Terminal) to log in the server, when told to log off, press the power button to shut down their computer, instead of logging off as they should. As a result their connection still remains "active" and the next time they try to log in they get an error message and become disconnected.
This happens only with NVT that uses IPX, I haven't noticed the same problem to appear to those terminals that use TCP/IP to connect.
I wonder if there is a command, or another way, to clear the unused "active" connections after a bad shutdown. Any ideas??
Thanks for your help so far..
P.S. About my previous post, I finally noticed that my server had become slow because of a remoter printer I'd installed. The result was to wait up to 25 minutes (!!!) for a printout!
Clearing the connection status depends on where the state of the connections are maintained. It might be possible that the connection states for these IPX connections are stored in a file? If so, you can just remove the stale files.
If the IPX connection state information is being preserved by a process, which should terminate on idle, but does not; then you can kill the process manually.
So, the trick to solving this puzzle is to do some homework and find out where the IPX connection state information resides. After you discover where the connection state info is managed, then you can decide the best way to clear the state information.
You are correct in observing that all robust implementation of TCP/IP manage state information in the socket structure and TCP does not have these problems. It is interesting that IPX does. Please let us know what you find out.