Calling program through ftp

[jj_dahlheimer]

I have a program I am running through ftp using RCMD. It runs but it is a long running program(about 15 minutes) and my session always times out before it gets done. I have tried from both a windows script and a green screen ftp session to the same system just to see if that would alleviate it.

I have tried different combinations of quote time xxxx xxxx.
I have tried different combinations of sendepsv and sendpasv from the green screen session.
The timeout set on our host is 50 minutes.

Not sure what else to try.

[DeadManWalks]

have you looked at RUNRMTCMD instead if connecting to a server other than ibm I. If connecting to ibm I then have the job submit to batch.

[jj_dahlheimer]

Little more detail, the server is our power system. The program I am calling generates a csv on the ifs and then the client (windows machine) will download it. Issue is the client always times out before the program has finished an so won't get the file properly.

And I can't submit to batch as I need to know when the program is complete. It kind of works that way right now. The program completes successfully when using the rcmd call just the client has no idea when it is done because of the timeout issue. Works fine for quick running programs as long as it does not run for more than a minute or so.

[tomliotta]

So your Power system is the (FTP) server and a Windows client invokes a program on the server that builds a file. The intention is that the Windows client needs to know when the file is available, so it tries to wait in the FTP session but the session times out too soon. Is that a good restatement of your problem?

Is the FTP session also going to download the file? Is the Windows client in the same network? (Any chance that the program might be sped up, i.e., perform better?)

[jj_dahlheimer]

Spot on description. I don't think it can be made to perform any better, it is a very simple program. Reads through a file and writes out to the IFS the contents in a csv. It is 10+ million rows with a 150 columns.

[tomliotta]

Many such simple programs can be sped up to run in half the time or even an order of magnitude quicker. It can depend on how it's coded and how its run-time environment is set. And was your reply also answering the other questions?

[Scott Klement]

You mention that the problem is that the CLIENT is timing out. If that's true, doing anything with the server settings, or setting something with 'quote' isn't going to help. You need to change the client's timeout, not the servers!

If using the IBM FTP client (from IBM i, such as a green screen session, or batch FTP) you can set the client timeout with the 'DEBUG T1' and 'DEBUG T2' options. So something like:

DEBUG T1 3000
DEBUG T2 3000

This sets the client side timeout to 50 minutes... again, assuming you are using the IBM client.

If you are using the Microsoft Windows client, I'm not sure if there is a setting for timeout? At least, I don't know of one. You may have to find a different client in that case.

[jj_dahlheimer]

tom - Even if it could run in half the time, that would still not be enough. It times out after a minute and currently it takes about 15 minutes. The rest of the response was just to give a quick overview of what it is doing and how much data it is, it is writing out about 6 gb of data. I could post code if you would like but it just sets the lower limit and reads through the file writing out each record.

Scott - I will give it a run from the green screen and if it works then I can at least blame the windows which is always preferable and then try and load a different client.

Thanks.