Re: [Noffle-devel] Re: [Noffle-users] how to make noffle NOT switch to offline mode

[Jim H. <jim...@ac...>]

On 28-Jan-2003 Mirko Liss wrote:
> Jim Hague wrote:
>> On 27-Jan-2003 Miernik wrote:
>> > That is not the timeout of noffle, but a 10 second receive timeout at
>> > the upstream server, which I can't change. 
> 
>> That makes sense. I think what we need here is for Noffle to have a
>> mechanism
>> for automatically retrying operations that fail due to timeout or connection
>> lost issues up to some configurable number of times before deciding to sound
>> the alarms. I'll add to the TODO....
> 
> The remote host returned the status 503, a general error that says
> nothing more than "Function not performed, closing connection".
> An INN with a corrupt database might return just the same status code
> when trying to fetch articles. AFAIK, there aren't any status codes
> notifying a timeout or just any kind of temporary error.

I'm thinking keeping it purely within client.c.

When reading a status currently in getStat(), we return a fake status if the
connection is lost. What I'm proposing would be to cache sufficient info in the
client module that we could re-connect and repeat the last transaction if we
get a failure of either STAT_CONNECTION_LOST (Noffle special) or
STAT_PROGRAM_FAULT (503). Yes, an upstream server might well return the latter
for a genuine fault, like a corrupt database, but in that case there won't be
any harm (other than a delay) in retrying, reconnecting if necessary. You count
the number of retries and stop after a threshold. By default I suggest never
retrying.

It would be fiddly and rather tedious to actually do this, but I think
possible. I am unlikely to volunteer in the near future.

-- 
Jim Hague - jim...@in... (Work), ji...@be... (Play)
Never trust a computer you can't lift or you don't control.