eXcursion DECterm windows freeze

[Michael D. Feeney]

Has any one come across the problem of DECterm windows freezing? We are running eXcursion v7.3-189 on Windows XP desktops connecting to OpenVMS v8.2 running on Alpha DS25s.

Some of the programmers are experiencing a problem when they logoff a process in a DECterm window. That window and all other DECterm windows freeze. Windows Task Manager shows them as not responding so they are ended.

Some have lost a lot of work because there seems to be no way to get the windows to respond to anything.

I haven't yet been able to narrow the problem down to anything other than having several DECterm windows open, doing some heavy work in them, and then trying to close one of them.

Can any one think of any likely causes?

[Hoff]

Consider engaging your developers to do a little debugging here. (This is debugging that any of your developers will be familiar with, too.)

This could be... Your network. NICs. Network storms. Some local or generic Windows issue. Some sort of an eXcursion issue. A firewall or router issue. This could be some sort of cleanup or logout processing, too, for instance.

As a test, see if a local Mac OS X or Linux clients and the respective X11 stacks included within these have similar issues to your Windows box. That would tend to point to the host or to the client.

Do take a look at the ECO level of your OpenVMS Alpha system. There can be any number of triggers here.

Yes, some sort of eXcursion bug would be a reasonable guess. Try a different X package for Windows, or use a client that has X.

And you'll probably want to engage HP more directly if you have a support contract in place for the PATHWORKS 32 stuff; I'd not expect substantial PATHWORKS 32 depth of experience here in the OpenVMS forum.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

If the work lost is editing, consider edit/tpu with /recov. That will redo the edit session (almost) until the hang.

Wim

[Olivier B]

Hi,

We had some troubles with decterm. When the process runing pcx$server.com stops, WSA device disappeares and we were loosing the sessions.
I had this script in sylogin and it works fine in IP, Decnet. LAT was for VXT session, test could probably be deleted.
This create a new WSA device on same client and initial device could disapeares without problem.

Hope this will help...

[Hoff]

If there are multiple sites seeing this, then this increasingly smells like an eXcursion or PATHWORKS 32 bug of some sort, or mayhap a problem with the IP networking path.

DECterm is probably a bystander here.

Get a Mac or a Linux box (which have X), or find and load a different X Window Server for Windows, and see if that works more reliably here.

Fire up something like DEC$EXAMPLES:ICO.EXE in parallel with the other activities and see if that tips over when DECterm tips over, too -- that'll help determine if it's DECterm (and I'd guess not) or something lower down the OpenVMS X stack or (and assume this is more likely) over on the eXcursion or Windows client side.

[Michael D. Feeney]

Thanks for your suggestions. It's going to take a while to try them in a controlled manner. The problem has more of an intermittent nature. I haven't been able to get it to happen at will.

I was thinking that it is more of a local problem than a network wide problem because there are many people on the same network that have not been effected.

I'll check back with you when I have more clues.

Mike