RE: Internet Connection Sensor

I would use the basic socket open. If you cannot open the remote host,
the service is unavailable. (whether it be the internet is down or
their server is down does not matter.) If you can connect, close the
connection and submit the transaction.

Not knowing exactly how you post the transaction, but assuming it is an
HTTP(s) post.

If you have not performed any socket programming, you may want to look
at various shareware sites for the iSeries and find an API that will
test a connection for you.

Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
GKern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 7:57 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx; rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Internet Connection Sensor

Not sure if this is the correct place to ask so I cross posted in
midrange and rpg-l:

Yesterday our internet provider had an outage that affected their
customers within a large portion of the city. Consequently we were
affected too.

We have an RPG application that accepts credit card payments and then
uses Payware Transact from Verifhone to process the payment. But when
the internet connection died we didn't get any response from the
transactions that were in process when the internet connection died.

So the question becomes this: Is there a way (from RPG) to detect that
the internet connection is active before submitting the transaction? I
know that this wouldn't be foolproof because the internet connection
could be lost immediately after a successful 'detection attempt'. But
this would at least enable us to detect and notify users when the
internet connection is down, which would limit the number of
transactions that would not receive a response.