I'm doing some work for a company I used to work for. While I worked there, I set up a webserver on VMS and wrote some perl CGI programs which allowed their customers to enter data into the system. I used the OSU DECthreads web server and a package called Crinoid to allow the perl programs to be persistent. The perl apps are nearly standard CGI scripts. The only difference is a global variable telling Crinoid that it's ok to reuse the script.

Occassionally, things would hang. Lately it's been hanging quite often. There's plenty of evidence to say their NT 4.0 based Alta Vista firewall is causing at least some of the problems (it insists on writing hostnames to logs and I can't find a way to turn this off, there are other problems, too) but I've also seen the main Crinoid process hang. I can't figure out what's keeping it from processing messages. After a short while, all the application processes exit complaining about not receiving heartbeat messages.

I went looking for the Crinoid software recently but it no longer appears to be on the internet. The site linked above has a bunch of information but no longer has the software. Crinoid was written by Dr. Charles (Chuck) Lane. I did a google search for him but he seems to have disappeared from the net about a year ago. The last message I could find attributed to him anywhere was dated last April. I could not find the software anywhere.

Is anyone familiar with Crinoid, the OSU webserver, or other VMS based webservers that would allow me to run persistent perl scripts? The above setup works quite well while it works. I can fallback to running the scripts as real CGI scripts but that would probably result in a 10 fold performance reduction.

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print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';
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