Did IB just completely break sane API trading?

I had been running IB Gateway 972 for months unattended, to do API trading. Everything was fine, until it started giving me bogus "competing live session" error messages.

Customer support told me to upgrade to their latest version, 978, which allegedly fixes this bug.

To my surprise, Gateway now has the same idiotic forced autologoff or autorestart "feature" as TWS, which gave rise to 3rd party tools like IBController and IBC Alpha. The screenshot below is from the latest IB Gateway, 978.1o.



What is the f'in point of this autorestart?! Wasn't Gateway supposed to be the lighter version of TWS (i.e. without the memory leaks) that doesn't need to be restarted?

I tried talking to their customer service chat reps and the results are as you imagine (actually worse, after wasting the first hour of the chat on another dude with broken English who kept being completely unhelpful):

 

I agree that it sucks. Use IBCAlpha, IBCommander is abandoned. You also have to watch out for the auto-logoff time, most of the time it works but a few times it has shut off the client in the middle of market hours -- IBC postponed the time until suddenly it was unable to do so.

Also, do you trade 24 hours a day without any breaks? Even the futures market is closed for 15 mins. For forex I suppose you can choose a quiet period for a restart. You don't need constant connectivity typically.

On a one core VPS with a headless Gateway, restart takes about 30-40 seconds. Not that bad.

 

Have you tried another trading broker ?

 

4:20pm Eastern time seems like a good moment to restart.

But this isn't the only annoying hassle. Versions after 974 also force you to log in once a week, and you can't control when. Many times I missed their login prompt because I was out on a Saturday night.

For those who want to stay with v972, here's the link to the stable Linux version from IB's website as of March 11, 2020, and I've also uploaded a copy here - IB Gateway 972.1x for Linux, 64bit. Hashes:

• SHA512 - 7b86f074195fd388722bd5910bca298bfd2296de723168a9575d41374f9548b647f6c4c2e931746db3d15b9d8c782b129b5b831635aa0c795699e4e6bc2201f2
• MD5 - 2b0d9dc80972c3775b9bb7e8956500ca

 

Why not use IBCAlpha to get around this?

 

Because it can't do anything about it for 974+. See the README, though it only talks about TWS, it applies to Gateway as well because it's the same codebase (as you can see in my screenshot, they forgot to remove the order Presets from the Configuration, the title bar is the same etc.).

 

find a way to download older versions. I always keep older versions in case shit like this happens.

 

Did you see my post #4 above? I've even mirrored the last properly working version.

Also, you can't simply "find a way". Download from where? How do I know the copy is not compromised? IB doesn't host old versions of their software.

 

Bob111 used to keep all versions of TWS. Ask him by PM if he has gateway.

 

There's another approach to this. I'm using 978 successfully. You need two accounts, the "gateway" one with only data access which is opted out of 2FA. If you must use 2FA for everything then you're out of luck.