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Postings from January 2001
We recently upgraded our development operating system from Solaris 2.5.1 to Solaris 8 (also encountered on 2.7.1 and suspected to be a problem in 2.6). While we did not expect any problems with our extensive Perl based application, we have found that a Oracle database connection pooling server has serious problems with socket connections on the new O/S. I have attempted to research and develop a solution to this problem with no solution in sight (other than a complete rewrite). I am hoping someone on one of these lists has had a similar experience with the issue. We are using straight TCP sockets using the Perl Socket module within the server programs themselves. The server is a pre-forking parent/child server with spawning of additional children as needed. The parent binds to a master port on which the clients connect to find a free child. Each child binds its own unique port which are collected by the parent and passed to the clients on a connect. Connections to the parent either cause a connection to a child which passes the data back to the client, or a spawn of a new child as needed and connect to a child. The child is spawned using a subroutine "spawnChild()" which takes a FileHandle object as a argument. This filehandle is opened on a "-|" and the given process ID is assumed as the pid of the child/parent relationship. The child is the spawned as a separated processs using exec. This exec'd file is expected to bind to its own port in the same 250 port range as the parent and passes back STDOUT to the parent to notify it of its port location. However, it never successfully binds its own port. The children report "Invalid argument" from the socket bind. The ports which are occupied by the parent are found as unavailable, while any other bind attempt returns "Invalid argument". I believe this issue to be directly related to how the child forks using a " -|" on a file handle rather than a generic fork, as I have seen some indications that Solaris 2.6 does not play well with pipes. I've begun remediating this server by completely rewriting the server and connect mechanism using IO::Socket from scratch using a more standard pre-fork model. I feel that the method that the current server runs is quite kludgy, as I have not found an example of a pre-forking server that behaves the same way. So far, the server development is progressing adequately, however, I'd like to hear if there might be a way to minimally change the current server process so that it will work on Solaris 2.8, as this will save considerable effort to develop. Thanks for any input, Fred Hirsch Senior Applications Developer Market Information Systems Toronto Stock Exchange