We are running AREV and the NT Service at a site and we have run into situations where locks are held on a record and (as best as I can tell) no one is in the system. I suspect a crashed session of AREV and an unreleased lock.

How long does the LH Service hold a lock after the session has crashed?

Is it also dependant on when the NT server recognizes that the station is no longer communicating to the LAN or is this completely determined by the communication from the NPP and the LH Service?

Thanks

To the best of my knowledge, the NT Service will not release a lock until it detects that a workstation is no longer 'sharing' the Named Pipe.

A named pipe is an NT resource that, for most all purposes, may be thought of as a file. If a workstation has a problem and the network thinks that station is alive and using resources on the server, then the NT Service will not know that this lock is invalid and will not release it. With this said, if a station has a problem, make sure that you reboot the machine.

PS: If you check the shared resource list on the server, you can see who is suposedly using the LHSRVC named pipe.

Mark

]]If you check the shared resource list on the server, you can see who is suposedly using the LHSRVC named pipe.

Assume you mean: Control Panel, Server..

]]the NT Service will not release a lock until it detects that a workstation is no longer 'sharing' the Named Pipe.

Right, but say a workstation crashes and the user goes home. How long before the LH Service determines that there is no communication from the workstation or activity relative to that Named Pipe so it can release the lock?

I had assumed with Netware and the LH NLM that under the same scenario either the Netware watchdog would eventually clear the connection depending on the duration of the Watchdog Timeout (which can be set by the Sysadmin) OR perhaps LHIPXSER.NLM would time out since it had not heard from the TSR within its expected timeout interval.

Chris

Chris,

A Named Pipe is treated as a pseudo file to an NT server. What I mean is that, if a user crashes and goes home then, hopefully the NOS will eventually timeout that connection. Until a session clearance occures, the Named Pipe resource is 'in use' and the NT Service will not time out a station.

As long as NT sees the station as alive, it will not clear the workstations resources – including the pipe access and, until the NT Service recieves an unlock from the specific session from the workstation or sees the pipe as closed by that session on the machine, it will not free up 'active' resources. Under a crash scenario, if the user shuts down their machine then NT will free all resources and the NT Service will release the locks being used by that connection.

There is *NO* timeout built into the Service while a station 'looks' alive so a lock can last until the offending station is cleared or the NT Service is stopped.

There is also no Revelation NT Service functions for clearing active stations. If this is needed, use the NT server shared resource manager to clear the use of the named pipe by the workstation and the lock will be freed.

(PS: I use NT at the office but 95 at home and I can't remember exactly where the shared resources are controlled from. I think you are right with Control Pannel -] Server. In there you will see 'In Use' and I believe that is where you can clear a station from the named pipe.)

Mark Martin

Revelation

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