We had a problem with our RF barcode scanners that we use in our warehouse for inventory: every once in a while, they'd lose the connection to the host. Sometimes when the connection got dropped, they'd be in the middle of picking an order, and the dropped connection left the order in a messy state.
In order to mitigate this problem, we use screen
http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/screen/ (AIX RPMs here:
http://www.oss4aix.org/download/RPMS/screen/) to abstract the session on the RF device -- if the connection drops, the same user can just log back in and resume the screen session. One caveat -- screen is for all intents and purposes a VT100 terminal emulator, so you have to make sure that whatever you're connecting to (in our case Prelude) is expecting VT100, and the device you're using is expecting the same.
To automate this, part of the login script for our RF gun users is:
#!/bin/sh
export TERM=vt100
if screen -ls | grep "No Sockets found" > /dev/null 2>&1
then
screen -s /usr/local/bin/prelude.login
exit 0
else
SCREEN=`screen -ls | grep -v "screen" | awk '{print $1}'`
echo "You are already logged on."
echo "What do you want to do:"
echo "1 - Resume Previous Session"
echo "2 - Start a New Session"
while [ ! "$yn" = "1" ] && [ ! "$yn" = "2" ]
do
echo "Please enter 1 or 2."
read yn
done
if [ "$yn" = "1" ]
then
screen -D -R $SCREEN
fi
if [ "$yn" = "2" ]
then
screen -s /usr/local/bin/prelude.login
fi
fi
exit 0
