Brad Van Duser reported:
!Ah, you got me farther along...even though the line:
!
! $browser->send($asc) or die $@;
!
!appears to be writing to the socket connection and not dying on me,
nothing
!is ever received by the target web server. I tried both EBCDIC and
!ASCII-based web servers as targets. I also tried writing converted and
!unconverted strings by removing the call to iconv. In no case did I ever
!get even so much as a blip in the web server log.
!
!My guess is that either the write to the socket failed early on and/or the
!TCPIP packet was malformed enough that the stack could not deliver it. My
!next stop is to ask our TCPIP support fellow to run a packet trace and see
!if the packet ever left our mainframe system's OSA card (the NIC). If it
did
!I need to see if the packet is formed properly and if it didn't leave the
!box then we have a very low-level TCPIP issue with our Perl 5.8.0 build.
One way to test the hypothesis that little to no web browser
type traffic is getting out of the mainframe would be to run
another client program. A typical ftp client on Unix should
be able to take arguments like:
ftp <server.name.com> <servic port number>
So while logged into USS on the mainframe run:
ftp ourinternal_server.eds.com 80
You should see some messages scroll by then you should be
able to type the HTTP request. Something like:
GET /
should be able to retrieve the index.html in the server's
document root. If you do not see messages on the server
port or if a simple "GET /" does not work that might indicate
trouble with outbound tcp/ip requests from the main frame.
!This is so odd since we had over 97% of the test suite passing...I am
!beginning to wonder about the quality of the tests that are running and
!whether they are actually running properly on EBCDIC-based systems or not.
It is actually difficult and controversial to write regression tests
that actually do any network traffic. There may be a few in the
perl regression tests, but they do things like pwent.t does which is
to try to make sense out of gethostbyaddr() calls to IP addresses like
"127.0.0.1". Bear in mind that you do not want test failure indications
on computers that have no network connection. Bear in mind that
pinging or accessing certain servers can be difficult/impossible from
a machine behind a firewall. Bear in mind that a central registry
of successful tests has a big-brother-esque controversy surrounding it.
In a nutshell you would need to carry out the necessary network tests.
!Unfortunately, our 5.6.1 build only works in a static configuration and we
!had really hoped to deploy the dynamic support in 5.8.0 which appears to
!work ok. But in the interest of time we may have to ship 5.6.1 with our
new
!z/OS system when it goes out in 2 weeks.
As far as I recall it is possible to build 5.6.1 with dynamic linking.
You simply need to be sure to specify:
-Dusedl
when you run Confugire. Is a rebuild out of the question?
Peter Prymmer
