RE: Network File recovery

["Andy Nolen-Parkhouse" <aparkhouse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rick,

Thanks for the clarification.  You'll find that once a transmission
makes it into it's queue, that the system will take care of it as other
objects on the system.  You have a great deal of flexibility in
configuring the communications parameters, so that it will continue to
retry in the event of communications failure.  Occasionally I have had
transmissions stop because of bad comm.; the end result was that I had
to restart the queue.  But nothing was lost.

Some of the drawbacks of SNADS that I have seen are:

- It tends to be somewhat 'invisible'.  It is easy to forget that stuff
is going on.  I never really developed the discipline to monitor the
process.  I know that I have frequently audited other peoples systems
and found numerous (and sometimes very large) netfiles which had never
been received into physical files, some of them very old.  This can be
overcome by good operations procedures.

- It uses space generously.  I've never really delved into the
techno-guts of the process, but my impression is that whatever you are
sending with the SNDNETF command will be duplicated into the outgoing
queue.  If you're sending large objects, then you need to know that the
size of that stuff will be duplicated until the file completely reaches
the other system.  The space used by the queues, will not necessarily
show up on your normal disk space reports, so if your disks start
getting full and you can't find the culprit, the queues (both sending
and receiving) are a good place to look.

- It shuts down when your disk space exceeds your defined threshold.
This is probably a good thing, but I've known many people who either
didn't know or forgot this situation.  Hours of confusion ensued.  SNADS
is not a reliable system for those whose disk utilization is frequently
above the ASP threshold.  You won't necessarily lose things, but they
won't go anywhere.

Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse

> On Behalf Of Rick Rayburn
> Subject: RE: Network File recovery
>
> Andy -
>
> The machine has not gone down at this moment...I am trying to plan for
> future trouble as I have some users who are NOT receiving their
network
> files in a timely manner...and leaving them overnight. My worry is
that if
> the 400 goes down in the interim, can I recover the files? We've had
> problems (very few, of course....it is the 400 after all!) that dealt
with
> power outages and bad controller cards. I just want to make SURE that
ANY
> "downage" will not result in loss of these files.
>
> Thanks Andy.