Any way to avoid a "TCP RST"?

[Russ Carraro]

I have both an Alpha and a VAX cluster with monitoring software that pulls performance data from various Alpha and VAX servers every morning.  The servers are running OpenVMS 6.2 or 7.1 with UCX 4.2 - ECO 5.  Most of the servers I am pulling the data from are behind firewalls so I use RCP to pull the files.  The monitoring servers successfully pull the data from all but TWO of the Alpha and VAX servers.  When trying to pull data from these two servers I get the message

"%RCP-E-INVRESP, invalid response from remote system".

I can successully send a file from the monitoring clusters to ALL servers using RCP and if I sign onto either of the two Alpha or VAX servers that I have the problem I can successfully send and pull files to the monitoring clusters.  So it's only when I'm signed onto one of the monitoring cluster nodes and try to pull a file from these two servers that I have have this issue.  According to the customer's  vault and network support team they are seeing "TCP RST" messages in their log files for the servers I have the trouble with, the others have "TCP FIN".

Any idea how to determine what is causing the "TCP RST" and how to fix or avoid it?

[Hoff]

Options, well, other than upgrading from fossil-grade fifteen-year-old -- and clearly somewhat buggy -- software, I presume.

OpenVMS V6.2 and later offer the DCL command COPY /FTP, which means you have an easy way to embed this stuff in a command procedure, and a potential alternative to RCP.  But then the COPY /FTP stuff could be a little wonky that far back, too.

[John Gillings]

Russ,

   Could this be an issue with the firewall? Any logs to see what happens to the request?

  Have you tried COPY/FTP/PASSIVE?

   If that fails, do RSH commands work? That way you could trigger the copy from the monitoring servers, but initiate the copy from the monitored server.

[Russ Carraro · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the replies.  The server creating the performance data is in their vault, i.e. behind their firewall, now and FTP is blocked.  I can RSH to it so I'm creating a command that I can send via RSH to have that server RCP the data back to me as a work around.  Network support hasn't seen anything in their logs tp explain why there is this one way issue.