Re: Good news, except for Orbix...

[Alexander Sim <asim@math.lbl.gov>]

Hi, there...
I don't have much things to say about this orbixd crashing.
Recent email from senior engineer at IONA doesn't look that promosing to 
fix the problem in a short period of time, even though my complain sounded
very "strong". The fact is they haven't tested with other vendor's orbs and
that they don't know what caused the problem. Also they don't really care. 
They didn't even know Orbixd doesn't function well on Solaris 2.6.
I have Orbix version of inqei (my simulation of QO/EI) and it doesn't crash
orbixd. So, it seems like what causes the orbix daemon crashed is simply coming
from the fact that IONA hasn't tested with other vendor's ORBs. They just 
assume it'll work as long as it's CORBA compliant. Maybe OmniBroker has some 
contribution in this part of CORBA compliant.  who knows...  
When I test GC storage manager components with my simulated QO/EI, orbixd 
crashes usually when a new query comes in after a while from the previous query.
I can crash orbixd 95% with that method. ;-) 
How do you crash orbixd, David? 
I asked that senioir engineer in IONA about how we can re-connect the orbixd 
with server objects in case the daemon dies. He had no answer. So, it seems
that fail-over was not of concern to them when they built orbix daemon. 
Yesterday I went to World IIOP seminar at SF, by IONA. I met two guys from
forte, and they built CORBA Orb by themselves for their product (because 
orbix was not that reliable of course), and they include fail-over 
functionality in case something happenes. They don't sell the Orb by itself
like Orbix or VisiBroker, but they claim that their product is CORBA compliant
and it can be client and server that conencts to any other vendor's orbs.
It gave me an idea that what if we build our own orb ? we don't need a 
huge Orb like orbix, but just a few functionalities of CORBA (only things 
that we need...)....
Well, right now, what I have done to reduce the orbix daemon crashing is 
to compile with the patched version and run it on Solaris 2.5.1. 
It still crashes, though, about an equal percentage....
Sorry folks... it was not a good news...
I'll talk to you later...
--Alex