Re: Are negative socket descriptors valid?

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hi John,

-1 indicates an error.
0 or higher is a valid descriptor.

There should never be any other negative numbers (besides -1) returned 
by the socket() API.  But, are you certain that the -250 to -350 is 
returned by the API?  How would you know that, do you have the source code?

It seems to me that the sockets used by CGI are build/handled by Apache. 
and the sockets used by SNDM are built/used by SNDM.  So I don't see why 
you'd ever see a socket descriptor yourself?


On 9/30/2011 7:55 AM, Maassel, John R. wrote:

> We've been running the SNDM command without trouble for years. Now
> we're seeing a large number of sends failing because of an invalid
> socket descriptor (the integer returned by the socket() function and
> passed to all other functions, like connect(), select(), etc.).
> They're in the -250 to -350 range and another piece of SNDM is
> rejecting this as invalid as it's less than zero.
>
> I checked the API for the socket() API and it describes 2 return
> codes: -1 if there was an error, or 'n' if there was not.
>
> It doesn't say whether n is supposed to be positive, but other
> platforms I've coded on (and with the file descriptor for open() on
> the i) expect the socket to be positive.
>
> Are negatives allowed? If they are not, why is the system suddenly
> returning negative sockets?  We upgraded from V5R4 to 6.1 about a
> month ago.
>
> What may or may not be related is we're seeing a bunch of this
> happening in CGI jobs.
>
> Any advice will help. Thanks.