Invalid socket connect timeout?

[Scott Raney]

On Sun, 27 Oct 2002 "RCS" <rcs at rcsprogramming.com> wrote:

>   Is there a way to set the time that the internal MetaCard engine takes to
> 'try' to open a socket? I have found that if a socket is not valid (or the
> host is not on the network) MetaCard will try to connect for up to one
> minute until it returns a socketError...is this normal?

It'd be helpful to have the platform and the script you used for
reports like this.

The only problem I know of in this area is that "open socket .. with
message" doesn't work right if a connection fails on MacOS.  This has
already been fixed for 2.5 alpha 7.  In general, though, this sort of
thing unfortunately is never going to work as well on MacOS (including
OS X) as it does on Win32 and UNIX because of limitations in the way
OpenTransport and the underlying socket implementation works (indeed,
even the standard UNIX utilities like ping and telnet take a long time
to time out compared with the equivalents on Win32 and other UNIX
platforms).  In some specific cases, specifically failed DNS lookups,
that 60 second timeout is actually hard-coded into the OS and so is
not anything we can change without writing a whole bunch of new code
so that we don't have to rely on OS routines to do these lookups.
  Regards,
    Scott

> Thanks,
> JR

********************************************************
Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...