Tribon Data Base superserver and subserver

Theclient-server access to a data bank located on a remote machine is based on ONCRPC (Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Calls). In order to provide accessto data bank located on the server we must have the following Windows servicesrunning on the server machine:

·        PowerRPC Portmapper

·        TRIBON M1 DB Service

TRIBONM1 DB Service is what we call "superserver". Its executablefile is – ea312.exe.

Thissuperserver listens to calls from client applications and when the firstrequest to access a data bank arrive, the superserver run another program –ea310.exe which we call "subserver".

Onthe server machine we may have only one superserver process, but more than onesubserver processes. For every application accessing the data banks, we musthave one subserver process dedicated to transfer the data between theapplication and the data banks. When the application is terminated thecorresponding subserver process should be automatically stopped. In otherwords, if you have 10 Tribon applications accessing data bases locatedsomewhere on the server, then you should have one ea312 process and ten ea310processes running on the server. If you do not have any Tribon applicationrunning – you should have only one ea312 process running on the server.

However,it might happens that the data base subserver process is not terminated whenthe client's application exit. For a period of few hours a small design group(let say 5 – 10 persons) usually generate a number of such obsolete subservers.These obsolete processes could lock some extra licenses, lock or even corruptthe corresponding data bank, decrease the system performance, etc. Hence, wehave a pretty good reason to terminate any obsolete Tribon subserver as soon asit appear. There are several ways to do that.

Oneof them is to use "Tribon DB Server Maint" application.Unfortunately, it is hard to determine there which process is obsolete andwhich one – not. Using this application any user can kill any Tribon subserver.It is very easy (and it happens quite often) to terminate a working subserverand this way to destroy the corresponding application. Then somebody in theworkgroup will get the message "Tribon DB SubServer on host host_namenot responding" and his application will not be able neither to save thechanges to the data base, neither to read from the data base.

Oneoptional way to deal with the obsolete Tribon subservers is to use the new DBTools Pro version and its Data Base SubServer process control facility.It provide an easy and safety way to clean any obsolete subserver. WhileDBTools Pro is running on the user's machine, it constantly monitor allsubservers and Tribon applications running on the user's PC. If one applicationexit and its corresponding subserver does not terminate, a message box willinform the user about the obsolete subserver and an option to kill this processwill be provided. The users are allowed to kill only those Tribon subserversthat belongs to themselves. An Administrator's version is available as well. Ithas extended functionality and allows also obsolete subsevers clean up atscheduled time interval.