A followup to my last message. The first message I sent I left a
space before and after the asterisk and I thought maybe the second
space caused the problem so I sent the identical message this time
starting with MSG *the gross profit at ................ and got the
above system message back on my machine [337] User is not logged
on. Again, I don't remember this happening in 19 years but am I
missing something in the syntax??

"bob marik" wrote:
Hi Bob - you had it right the first time. The syntax is:
msg destination text

Your note above says "send a message to port '*the'", which is
invalid. The destination can be a port number or a user name, which
is why you don't get an error about the destination being a
non-numeric. (Or is that a non-nuMarik at your site?")

Anyway, "target line is roadblocked" is a common error, used to be
anyway, that means D3 is aware of a port, maybe a live one, but it's
not getting a confirmation that the message is getting all the way
through to some terminal on the other end. This could be due to a
user who exited without logging off where there is no "trap dcd exit"
to tell D3 to drop the line when the connection drops. Using "*" for
the destination instructs the system to send a message to all
currently logged-on users. Because of this, if it were my system I'd
reboot because it seems that a logged-on process is inaccessible, and
that's probably not a good thing. Compare that to "msg !* ..." which
means "send to all ports regardless of connection status", and in that
case you could almost expect ports to not respond.

I don't think it's anything to worry about really, but if you get a
chance sometime it can't hurt either to stop D3 and then reboot Linux.
If it turns out some user actually can't get access to a dedicated
line because of some dead port situation, it's better to address the
situation proactively than find out about it when all users are up and
you can't do anything about it.

HTH.
T

(Looking forward to seeing you at Spectrum, Bob!)