Opening a random file on a network drive - Delay when not available.

[A.Basit A.Bulbulia]

Hi !

I often map drives over a network (VPN) or map drives over a DSL
connection; a problem I often have is when the drive I am connected
to where a random file resides is not available or the ping response to it is way to long . .

What usually happens is my software would hang with no error display.
Is there any solution that could report the drive as unavailable sooner.
Although I trap the error with a error routine the process
before the operating system reports none availability is drawn out.
Is their anyway to trap the none availability of a drive sooner??

This is how I connect to the drive (sample random file):-

ON ERROR GOTO ERR_R:
OPEN"\\10.0.0.99\BACKUP\PROGRAMS\TEST.XXX" FOR RANDOM ACCESS READ WRITE SHARED AS #1 LEN=256
FIELD#1,256 AS T$
LSET T$="TSET XXX end"
PUT#1,1
GET#1,1
CLS
PRINT T$
CLOSE
END

ERR_R:
IF ERR=75 THEN PRINT”DRIVE DOWN ! ! ! “ RESUME (TO SUB WHICH WILL HANDLE THE ERROR”

Thanks in Advance

BASit


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[Mel Bishop]

Have you taken into account the possibility of the drive having
to spin up after a power down (as appropriate)?

If so, the only other thing is some kind of timer function that
will time-out after a specified period of time and jump your
program to an error handler. Don't have a clue as to how to
structure the function.


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[A.Basit A.Bulbulia]

Thanks Mr Bishop,

*Hehe* ummmmm drive must power up . . I mean like why? these days drives don't power down energy saving is not a big issue any more as long as the rich nations could plunder the resources of the poor; with either war or >>> lets not go there !!

I have looked at various methods to check if the drive is available (outside the program); however what I was hoping for is some routine or function as you call it that could return a ping response to the program before the drive is open'ed.

Someone please help . .

BASit



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[Donald Darden]

If you want to make sure the drive is available so as not to
cause a delay within your program, than I might suggest not
"pinging" it, but perform a DIR reference to it when the program
starts. You can do this in a BAT file by spedifying it as the
working directory for when your program starts.

I don't know what you intend to do if the working drive\directory
is not available, but then I'm not sure why you want to create a
random file on a networked drive anyway, since that is probably
intended to be temporary in nature, and it is not near as efficient
to write and read file data over a network connection.

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Old Navy Chief, Systems Engineer, Systems Analyst, now semi-retired