🚀 go-pugleaf

> The server itself never checks the state of its client
> connections.  Instead, it relies on the OnExecute event handler
> to disconnect the sockets, or otherwise perform reading/writing
> operations on the sockets so that Indy can detect disconnects at
> the API layer, which will then cause the reading/writing operations
> to throw an exception that the server can use to terminate the
> managing thread and clean up the socket.

So, if the disconnect will be coming from the client's end of the
connection, is the best way to make sure the component recognizes that
disconect to periodically try to read from all connections, trusting
that they'll error out correctly when the connection is no longer
active?

I thought at first that would be simple enough to do, but I'm having
a hard time finding how to even access all the (apparent) connections.
The best I could come up with to even see how many connections I have
is Server1->Bindings->Items->Collection->Count, but that seems like
more layers of properties than would generally be used for something
so fundamental, so I'm assuming I may have missed something.  How would
you normally tell an application to do something with each connection
on a TIdTCPServer?



> Are all of the applications running on a single machine?  If so,
> ...
> Of course, if you need to check applications across a network, then
> using TCP/IP is best,

The applications are scattered across a network, with a centralized alarming 
system.

> although I would suggest not closing the port at all.  Leave it open,
> and have the alarming application send a request over the connection.
> The server can then report back whether an alarm exists, and better
> can also report what the details of the alarm actually are.

I agree that would be a better design, but at this point it's going against 
the inertia of wanting to set up the alarming for this application the same 
way that several prior applications were set up.  Also, the alarming 
application itself is now in the control of a different department who 
monitors our platforms for us.  It's easier to ask them to add a new address 
and port to the list of platforms they check than to coordinate a new 
protocol between our machine and theirs.