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HP OpenVMS Systemsask the wizard |
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The Question is: One of our clients have a process running on our Alpha machine, they want to terminate idle processes after a certain amount of time. I believe they're using a hardware solution to accomplish that at the moment. The problem is that when the idle processes are killed, it sometimes leaves their current records locked. We would want to write a program or command procedure so that it clea rs any record/file locks after killing the process. Is it possible to do that, given the process's username? Or, alternatively, is there some sort of "cleanup" program available in that clears "orphan" locked records? The Answer is : If using the OpenVMS distributed lock manager, OpenVMS cleans up the locks of deleted processes; the current RMS records and files are automatically unlocked, and any other uses of the distributed lock manager are also resolved -- the lock manager provides rather more than file and record locks, and is often used for tasks such as intracluster interprocess communications and intracluster process management. It is obviously possible for an application to use other application-specific locking techniques, and any such clean-up involved is accordingly and entirely application-specific. With a software-based process deletion, initial use of $forcex is generally recommended over $delprc -- $delprc may eventually be needed, but it is generally not the best initial choice. (Various idle-process deletion tools are discussed in the OpenVMS FAQ.) $forcex causes the process exit handlers to be invoked, while $delprc does not; $delprc is a process hard-kill operation. As is common practice, process deletions and power failures can have similarities and can potentially leave applications and application data in inconsistent states -- transaction and database systems are common solutions when there are multi-part update operations and/or the necessity of an ability to back-out transactions, and database packages and RMS journaling are options. For general programming discussions, please see topic (1661) and topics referenced there. DECamds and Availability Manager can be used to view OpenVMS locks, but, again, the OpenVMS Wizard would not assume these are in use here as locks owned by processes are released when the processes are deleted and when a cluster member node exists the cluster. Do ensure you have the current ECOs for OpenVMS, of course.
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