The point is that if we need to seat in front of the pc, waiting all day long for the Gateway to show its malfunctions, to manually restart it to resume normal data flow, of course, we could do it. As well as we can imagine "workaround" of all types. But why ? Why we do need to devise awkward workarounds, while the paid programmers cannot fix very simple and obvious bugs, and other obvious nonsense (wrt to the goal of automation) ? My question to IB is: is this really what you want to offer to investors who wish to do automated trading? A system that periodically needs random manual restarts even in the middle of a trading session and continuous human supervision and sitting in front of the machine. Really?
Who said anything about manually restarting it? You can and obviously should do all of that with automation. I run my stuff in the cloud so I'd never do manually anything (except watch the comings and going in an observation account at home).
Currently, the Gateway needs to be restarted manually to restart the data flow, as we need to log in with the security device. Are you using the device or have you lowered your security? How do you re-login after restarting the gateway?
Using IbcAlpha (previously IBController) and an account that is limited to trading only, no withdrawal or account management. Account management always requires additional verification.
Killing, restarting and logging into the Gateway (without security device) would not be a big programming problem: the program could be written in a few minutes. Certainly, an ugly workaround for something which could be easily fixed by IB. I still believe that the proper solution is to ask the original author for corrections, and not to try to do weird and awkward solutions to patch obvious bugs. As long as it's personal money, maybe. But most of my clients would not accept lowering the account security to allow an automated re-login (with encrypted credentials). Nor would I want to be responsible for that.
Then you can wait. There are numerous workarounds required with everything. If I'd wait for IB to fix all the bugs, I wouldn't be trading for the next few decades.
I guess you are using IB for other reasons ... so many better APIs/Brokers available for Futures compared to US Equities.