Newsletter: November 2005
Project Corner -
What? Me worry?
The solution is tested and works. It's installed in production. So, should I worry?
Absolutely! Processes are a combination of solutions which have to work together. Deploying anything new is rather like surgery to replace a body part, a heart perhaps. The new heart can be healthy and properly connected, but if the patient isn't prepped and planning for the operation doesn't include disaster planning...
Iguana and Chameleon make HL7 interface design, implementation and deployment easy for your successful HL7 project. What about the systems on either side which are using Iguana to connect? Iguana is in the middle and can be used to see if sources/targets are running. Users should take advantage of the logs and Iguana's configuration for automatic startup, reconnections and retries. If the HL7 target system goes down Iguana can be used to detect this. Traffic from the source can be stopped or stored until the problem is fixed.
Quick Tip:
After an Iguana solution is up and running, try shutting down the server and letting it restart. Did the Iguana service start automatically and turn on all the connections? Check the Iguana channel configuration for each production channel and set the values for:
- Start Automatically
- For outbound channels only
- Number of Send Retries
- Number of Reconnection Attempts - a good value may be 60 = 10 hours if every 10 minutes
- Reconnection Interval (milliseconds) - a good value may be 600000 = 10 minutes
Future newsletters will include brief project hints and pointers to more detailed articles on our web site. We welcome suggestions and comments so that we can focus on what matters to you!