Connecting to Another Application

Question

Our customer requires to connect OF 11.x to an optical archiving system. We need to add functionality to OF that enables the user to display a document; to that end, our custom application needs to be called, shelled, RFC'd or something like that, and the values from one or more OF fields need to be passed to our application in the process.
Is this possible? Where do I go to obtain information on that subject? (Unfortunately, the customer's OF documentation is not readily available to us.)
Thanks in advance,
Oliver Hanau.

Answer 1

"Connection refused" means that the client sends a "I would like to connect to port number 1234 please" packet to the server computer, and the server computer's OS sends the reply "there is no process listening at that port for the network interface you are using".
The server could be not running, or running but not listening to TCP/IP connections, or at a different port from what you think, or listening to only selected network interfaces (it is possible for a process to listen to a specific interface or a wildcard for all interfaces). A less likely scenario is that a firewall is sending the "connection refused" message.
First aid check list for "connection refused":
- Check host name.
- Check port number.
- Try numeric IP address of server host, in case name server is hosed.
- Are there any firewalls between client and server blocking the port.
- Check that the server is running.
- Check that the server is listening to the port. On the server, try: "telnet localhost the-port-number". Or "netstat -an", there should be a listening entry for the port.
- Try "telnet server-host-name the-port-number" from the client, to see if firewalls are blocking it.
- If "telnet" fails: try telnet with the numeric ip address.
- If "telnet" fails: does it fail immediately or after an obvious timeout? How long is the timeout?
- Does the server respond to "ping serverhost" or "telnet serverhost" or "ssh serverhost"?