How to waste half a day with EDI

Yes, thats EDI or Electronic Data Interchange.

The problem for me, is that one of our big customers wants to stop sending us Odette DELINS messages, and instead start using Edifact DELFOR messages. It's a problem for me, because I need to work out how to do it!

So let's start by seeing if we can translate a simple DELFOR file into the in-house format to feed into our ERP system. Let's created the test file, by copying & pasting the sample provided in the pdf of the specification. Simple... No...it does not work. Why? Every thing looks ok!

After hours of double checking & going around in circles. Finally the answer.

In an EDI file, each line is terminated with a ' character - thats ASCII code 0x27. But I finally realised that the lines in my file were terminated with character code 0x92, which looks very similar in the character set I was using.

When you use the correct terminating character, it all works a lot better!
So todays lesson is - be careful when you copy & paste text from a pdf!

Checking Solaris iScsi Performance with Dtrace

I've just discovered David Weibel's Blog and he has a couple of interesting posts regarding using dtrace(1M) to check performance issues with iScsi on Solaris.

• iSCSI Kernel Visibilty


• iSCSI device reporting lots of iSCSI sessions logging in and out


• And David show a way to disable MPxIO for the Solaris iSCSI initiator here.

David worked on the Solaris iScsi initiator code when he was at Sun Microsystems, Inc.