The network manager usually displays information about the clients that are currently connected to it. Either the name or network address of connected clients will be displayed, depending on whether the name is available or not. The number of users is also shown. This is the number of connected machines, not the number of DP4 programs using the server, which may be greater. If you wish you can disable this display by specifying the −detach option on the command line. If you are loading DP4 from a shell script on Unix or Linux you may also want to do this if tcpmgr is not the last line in the shell script. Alternatively you can put an & character at the end of the line that loads tcpmgr to force the shell script to continue.
Many DP4 users are in the habit of automatically specifying -detach on tcpmgr. In at least one case a customer requested an enhancement to be display exactly the same information as tcpmgr does display, unaware that the only reason he did not see the information was that he had specified -detach! We think this information, while it could be improved on, should be of use to network or system administrators. In older versions of DP4 networking this information was somewhat unreliable. In 4.520 and beyond it is trustworthy. When upgrading to 4.520/4.616 networking or later you must also upgrade your system database as the maps used are different from earlier releases.
On Windows NT and Windows 2000 you will only be able to see the output from tcpmgr if you enable the option to allow the DP4 service to interact with the desktop. "Allow service to interact with desktop" is one of the properties that can be set in the Startup Properties Properties for the service in the "Services" Control Panel Applet. From release 4.620 this property is set automatically if you use srvw32 −install to create the DP4 service. With earlier releases you need to use Control Panel to change the DP4 service configuration.
If you wish you can get the display to timeout after a specified timeout by specifying the −scrnsave option with the desired timeout in seconds. On Windows you will normally rely on the Windows screen saver. You should use a simple screen saver on a machine that acts as a DP4 server, such as the NT Logon screen saver, as some screen savers may impact performance.
If a machine is loaded as a combined client/server using either the Named Connection configuration or the Multiple Resilience Combined Client/Server, then for technical reasons, the normal display is suppressed.
On Windows platforms, in these configurations, the network manager will automatically behave as though −detach was specified, and will send diagnostic and other output to the DP4 Error Log (if it is running). On other platforms the network manager will usually default to its -quiet display mode. This simply displays messages teletype fashion as clients log on and off. If enabled, diagnostic messages will also appear in this output.
If tcpmgr is loaded under dbdaemon on Unix or Linux it automatically behaves as though -detach was specified. When tcpmgr is run like this it does not have a terminal and cannot be run interactively. However you can still display connection information from tcpmgr: put the command tail -display_address as the first command tail to tcpmgr. On Linux and Unix, tcpmgr creates a separate tcpmgr process for each connected machine. If you supply this command tail each tcpmgr process will replace it with the ip address it is acting a server for. This will normally show up when you run the ps program to display running processes (you may need to supply a command tail to get ps to show tcpmgr and other proceses running as daemons, probably -d on Unix and x on Linux). This information will also allow you to disconnect a specific machine without shutting down DP4 completely: just use kill on the connection you want to terminate.