5250 Print Sessions Don't Reconnect After Connection Outage

ID: Q165310

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft SNA Server, version 3.0

SYMPTOMS

5250 print sessions defined under the Host Print service for SNA Server 3.0 stay in an Inactive state after the SNA Server connection to the AS/400 recovers from a connection outage. This occurs even though the 5250 print sessions are configured for Automatic activation in SNA Server Manager.

This problem will occur even if the connection outage is caused by a planned outage, such as an AS/400 IPL.

SNA Server Manager will show that the connection to the AS/400 has been reactivated via the normal retry algorithm of SNA Server, but the 5250 print sessions are still Inactive.

CAUSE

5250 print sessions do not try to reestablish the APPC conversation after the APPC conversation was terminated by a connection outage.

RESOLUTION

The workaround is to manually start the 5250 print sessions after a connection outage has occurred.

The Host Print service has been updated so that 5250 print sessions will try to reactivate the APPC conversation using configurable parameters that set the number of retry attempts and the retry interval between attempts. These two parameters are configurable via the following registry parameters


   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
      \SnaPrint\Parameters\ActivationRetryLimit: REG_DWORD: <limit>

where: <limit> is the number of retries. The default value is -1 (infinite), if this parameter is not set.


   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
      \SnaPrint\Parameters\ActivationRetryInterval: REG_DWORD: <interval>

where <interval> is the retry interval in seconds. The default value is 10 seconds, if this parameter is not set. The updated module is:

<Snaroot>\System\Ppd5250.dll

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in SNA Server version 3.0. This problem was corrected in the latest Microsoft SNA Server 3.0 U.S. Service Pack. For information on obtaining the service pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

S E R V P A C K

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbnetwork prodsna kbbug3.00 kbfix3.00.sp1 snaprintservice
Version : WINDOWS:3.0
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbbug