RE: accessing PF from freebsd machine with perl

Sockets are beyond my expertise.


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of James Rich
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 3:54 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: accessing PF from freebsd machine with perl


On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, Scott Klement wrote:

>
>> The freebsd box (I hope, I run linux, not freebsd) can mount some 
>> share on the AS/400. By share, I mean a shared directory in the IFS 
>> using netserver stuff, AKA Windows sharing, AKA CIFS, AKA NetBIOS et 
>> al. After doing the mount, the share will look to the freebsd box 
>> like local storage.
>
> That's true, you could do that.  However, I'd recommend using NFS in
> preference to SMB/CIFS. It just fits the paradigm better.
>
> This method also doesn't work well when you need real-time response, 
> since it
> requires a program to poll for a file or record to exist.
Program-to-program 
> communications are more efficient if you need real-time response.
>
> There's also a huge risk of timing problems. You need to be very 
> careful that
> you don't have two things writing to the same file, and that the CGI
programs 
> don't ever add to files that have already been processed. So this will
take 
> careful planning.

I think Scott is right here.  As pointed out, there could be multiple 
processes all serving web requests and therefore wanting to write to the

file.  So you need something to handle that.  As Scott suggested, a
server 
program (using sockets) is probably the right way to go.  Write a daemon

that the apache processes connect to when they want to write.  Send the 
data to the daemon and then let the daemon be responsible for writing it

to disk.  You would probably want to tell the apache processes when the 
write has completed (or an error message if it doesn't).

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw