Re: MacTCP timeout

[joost (Joost Kemink)]

Alain,

I have only been working with MacTCP from Pascal, and I am not yet a Lisp expert 
so some of this might be incorrect. I'll give it a try anyway.

%tcp-passive-open is called with the tcpOpenPB.commandTimeoutValue set to 0 
(because the parameter block created in open-tcp-stream is filled with zeroes in 
the _NewPtr, Clear trap). Also, the call to the Device Manager that opens the 
port is made synchronously (see the #_pbcontrolsync call in %tcp-control), which 
means that the OS does not return control to you until an error or timeout 
occurs. This explains why you are not able to interrupt the %tcp-passive-open 
call, since a tcpOpenPB.commandTimeoutValue of zero indicates an infinite 
timeout interval (see MacTCP documentation on TCPPassiveOpen).

As you noticed, you can interrupt the call when you add the code that sets the 
commandTimeout value to 2. This causes the synchronous call to return a timeout 
error after 2 seconds. The #_pbcontrolsync call in %tcp-control is made inside a 
loop that only terminates when the returned error code is unequal to -23016, 
(which is the value for the timeout error). So, every time a timeout error 
occurs, the synchronous call is made again. This is why you can interrupt the 
passive-open call in this situation.

The solution to your problem is to remove the loop, so that the #_pbcontrolsync 
call is only made once and always returns the timeout error.

Hope this helps,

Joost Kemink
Apple Computer, Inc.
Advanced Technology Group