Database Replication - Does it work?

Has anyone been able to automate informix Database replication recovery? I've been trying now starting with R6.0, R7.10 and now R7.12. using two PPC/AIX servers connected via a LAN. The data is short lived - few hours to days, but the data is all critical to the real time applications writing and reading the data. The idea of using DR was that the data is replicated on a second server providing a hot standby backup. The applications and the environment that they run in are well behaved and invarient, and are required to provide 7/24 hour availability. The system must also be maintenance free (or as much as possible - if h/w fails, manual recovery will need to be performed). After starting the secondary from a level 0 archive of the primary, the paired machines run okay with data replicated from the primary to the secondary - all client applications are connected to the primary. Because I don't need to backup logical log data (my backup is the other machine), I have LTAPEDEV pointing to /dev/null on both primary and secondary. If the primary fails (onmode -k), the secondary changes mode to standard, with replication off - my client applications detect the failed primary, and reconnect to the secondary now standard - everything is still as it should be. If I recover the primary oninit before the secondary log files start overwritting the the primary recovers - Great. If the logfiles overwrite, I expected that when I try to recover the primary that I would be prompted to recover first from tape backups and that I would at this point just recover from scratch (archive 0 of the secondary) - okay. HOWEVER, I am not given any indication that I need to recover from tapes: The primary hangs in fast recovery and the secondary panics. At this point to recover the system requires careful manual procedures - not good. I've tried to point LTAPEDEV to a real file and periodically backup logical logs 'ontape -a' on the secondary server when it has changed to standard, but when I try to restore the primary it hangs in fast recovery and the secondary panics - again requiring careful manual procedures to recover. (the idea with this approach is to write the logfiles to a file, then remove the file to make the online believe that the data has been backed up and therefore will prompt for a tape when I try to restart the primary). Has anyone been able to sucessfully automate DR - has anyone been able to use DR sucessully any way? Informix Support keeps telling me that it works and that I must be doing something wrong. Any hints/help would be appretiated. Ken McCarthy 613-765-5226