Re: Send email on program halt

I have used a couple of commercial products in previous lives (MPLUS and
Help Systems Console) and they work well. I did not find a significant
difference between them.

Recently I found a program posted on CODE400.com by "jamief" dated
7/18/2008 (sorry my notes don't include the original program name or article
title-but does say something about WRKACTJOB being in the title or
description of the article). I made a few modifications to it (resubmitting
itself, on hour/off hour contacts). I set it to resubmit itself in its own
jobq (since most of our jobqs are single threaded) every 15 minutes during
work hours and hourly during off hours (to be honest, I didn't want to get a
page every 15 minutes during off hours when I was away from any way to solve
the issue for several hours). Messages go to group email address in our
email system, one used for office hours and one for off hours (in my case in
sends a text message to my cell.)

Since most of our jobqs are single threaded, if a job submitted in the jobq
I am using had a problem, this job would wait for that problem to be cleared
before actually running-defeats the purpose. Reading this thread however, I
have come to realize that if a restricted state back up (nightly) encounters
a problem, this program will not be submitted. So I may need to rethink that
piece. At some point in the future, I may add the ability to look at a
calendar file to account for holidays and such.

For our current needs, this program has been working well for us since
April. At previous places of employment, we had jobs that were always in a
*MSGW status (commercial software provided jobs), I don't know how well this
program might handle those.

This may help in your quest for a solution.


Jim Hawkins
Programmer/Analyst
Interkal LLC
Kalamazoo, MI