The following problem is encountered occasionally in most flavors of Unix and versions of Exceed. A user was able to use Exceed without problems to connect to the same Unix server just the other day. Today he opens up an Exceed connection and gets the Unix login window. After successful authentication the Exceed window immediately closes.

Looking in the user’s $HOME/.dt/startlog reveals the following error message:

XIO:  fatal IO error 131 (Connection reset by peer) on X server

Whenever a CDE desktop session is started, it creates several temporary files in $HOME/.dt/sessions/current

When the user exits CDE by clicking on the “Exit” button on the CDE toolbar, these files are removed and/or updated to reflect the fact that there is no current CDE session in progress.

However, if the connection between Exceed and the server is interrupted (there may be a network problem, a server reboot, a Windows or Exceed crash) these temporary files are not cleaned up. This will prevent the user from starting a new session.

To clean up the old session files manually, the user must telnet to the Unix server and run the following command

rm -r $HOME/.dt/sessions/current

If this does happen again, it may be a sign of a network problem between the user’s PC and the server. Sometimes this may be caused by firewall or VPN software running on Windows. The longer the Exceed session remains open, the greater is the chance of it running into some network issue. It is usually a good idea not to leave Exceed sessions running for extended periods of time.

A better alternative to Exceed is Cygwin.