Re: Strange problem with a terminal emulator written in Java: readStream() on a socket's input stream evidently returning -1 (eof)

I wrote:

Can anybody here shed any light on this situation:

A terminal emulator is reading from a socket connected to the Telnet
server. And under circumstances I can't duplicate locally, a
read(buffer, offset, length) is returning -1, apparently without
throwing an exception. Or perhaps it's throwing one in which e.getMessage() returns something containing the phrase, "Read timed
out".

For one customer, it's doing it with some regularity. Nobody else is
reporting it, and I can't recall seeing it myself.

Can anybody think of a set of circumstances in which this would
happen?

I now have it straight from the proverbial equine masticatory orifice that (1) they're using Secured Telnet, (2) they're not passing through any firewalls, and (3) this "read returning/read timing out" situation is consistently the cause of their lockups.

And my understanding is that it's *not* happening during the initial negotiation.

They're not an especially easy customer to update, and while I could certainly put in a blind-fix that would go right back into the read (after perhaps logging a message), there's no guarantee that this -- effectively nothing more than a Band-Aid -- would even help, if we can't determine *why* it's happening (and at this point, I don't even know *which* of the two possibilities is happening, only that a read that should theoretically block until bytes arrive is either returning -1 without an exception, or throwing an exception with the phrase "read timed out" in the message.

Any ideas?

--
JHHL