Sockets, signal and HTTP server

Based on the highly recommended examples from Scott Klement I created
programs (yes David, RPGLE programs :-) that communicate with scales
through sockets. I use sigaction and alarm to handle timeouts. Basic flow
of events:

- Register signal handler; save original signal handler (sigaction)
- Create socket
- Set alarm to 10 seconds
- Connect to socket
- If connected reset alarm, send command, receive data
- Close socket
- Restore original signal handler

This works great from a 5250 program. By defining the alarm time as an
entry field I can vary the time to timeout (very useful when debugging);
if I try connect to a non-existing IP address I get a timeout in the
specified time.

But if I try the same from a program that runs in the HTTP server (with a
call stack that includes Net.Data - DB2WWW) the signal handler never gets
called.

In debug I can see (trying to connect to a non-existing IP-address):
- sigaction returns 0, indicating that registering the signal handler was
successful; the data structure for the original signal handler contains
data
- alarm(10) return 0, indicating that no alarm was active; if I call alarm
twice, the second call returns something between 0 and 10, indicating that
the previous call was succcesful
- connect waits for 3 minutes and 6 seconds before returning 3447 - A
remote host did not respond within the timeout
- the signal handler never gets called

Anybody any idea what might be the problem? Could it be a conflict with
the HTTP server?

Release 7.1, TR7.

Joep Beckeringh