Detecting unusable OSAs

he z/TPF OSA-Express support has a concept of virtual IP addresses which allows you to swing IP addresses from one physical OSA card to another.      To communicate externally, OSA's have defined to them first hop gateway IP addresses.    All outbound IP packets are sent to these default gateways as the first hop.      If all of these gateways fail a message is sent to the console indicating the failure and the OSA remains in an "ACTIVE" state.  <br /><br />Detection of whether an OSA has default gateways that are usable and are active does not occur until a packet is sent externally through one of these gateway routers.    Customer encountered an issue where the alternate OSA, although seemed usable was really not usable because the default gateway defined to it was down.    It wasn't until the VIPAs were swung to the alternate that the issue was detected and at that point it is too late.   <br /><br />Customer is requesting we have a time-initiated process that checks the health of all default gateway IP addresses by issuing a PING message to the OSA gateways.    This would include checking on ALL the primary and alternate OSA's.    The mechanism to ping gateways exists today.        If there is no response received from a particular gateway, and message will be displayed to the console indicating the OSA connection and gateway IP that encountered the error.    In addition, the customer is requesting ZTTCP DISP ALL be updated with a "Health Check" column indicating which OSAs potentially have connectivity issues.    Customer uses 64 column wide terminals, so they are requesting, if possible, we keep ZTTCP DISPLAY ALL under the 64 character limit.