Celestial Software

I have three issues with absolutetelnet and Cisco Content switches:

1. The session locks up after a short idle time on the order of 10s of seconds.

The disconnect icon is active indicating that the connection is up. I can always hit it and reconnect successfully.

2. Pasting multiple configuration commands doesn't work.

If I paste a 4 or 5 lines it is OK but more than that seems to overflow a buffer. Sometimes the text at the end is truncated. Other times it appears that the returns at the end of each line are ignored.

3. Random beeps.

Any troubleshooting suggestions are welcome. I have version 1.84.

Thanks,

David

[ June 04, 2002, 11:36 AM: Message edited by: Brian T. Pence ]

David, thanks for taking the time to try out the application and post your feedback here!! I'll do my best to address the issues below....

1. Most problems that are idle-time related can be traced to the keepalive functionality which is enabled by default. AbsoluteTelnet implements the telnet keepalive as a telnet NO-OP command, which should just be ignored by the receiver. There are some systems (HP and some others) that don't expect a NO-OP and don't react well. Your Cisco system may be having some trouble with it, so I'd suggest disabling it in Options->Properties->Connection. It's likely that the next release of AbsoluteTelnet will change the default setting for keepalives to 'OFF'.

2. Seems like you have two issues here, so lets call them 2a and 2b.

2a. Paste truncation - this could be occuring on your server, as this should *not* happen in Absolute. Using another telnet app, can you verify that this condition is only occuring with Absolute???
2b. Paste line returns ignored.... Does this always happen or only in conjunction with 2a??

3. May be related to #1. If this persists after disabling keepalives, let me know.

I turned off the keep-alives and the session is staying up and the beeps are gone.

David

AHA!!

One more vote for turning off keepalives by default!! I thought I'd be smart and solve all of my users' disconnection problems by enabling this for them, but this seems to cause as many problems as it solves.

What about your pasting problems???

Brian

Cisco has fixed the problem in 5.00 Build 49s with the keep alives. I checked it out and the session stays up and the beeps which were the NO-OPs splatting against the Cisco switch are also gone.

Text pasting testing is still to be done.

Thanks for the update, David!!

David,

I wanted to follow up with you on your issue with AbsoluteTelnet and your Cisco hardware because I've had another user who is having issues pasting configuration commands into other Cisco hardware.

Were you ever able to overcome the issue with overflowing the input buffer??? That's the issue that we're struggling with right now, which seems to be a common theme across a lot of Cisco hardware that includes a telnet interface.

I'd prefer to be able to fix this with an firmware update to the hardware, but for now we've been able to address this with an update to the software that allows a configurable delay between each line of a paste.

How has your experience been lately?

Brian,

It turned out that the problem is a Cisco Content Switch bug. There is a feature request submitted to fix the problem: CSCdz45390

Essentially the problem occurs only for those commands which would prompt the user for an ack if he wasn't in expert mode. for example to create a new service.

David

Thanks for the update!