Hi Marcos, I am not a FreeDOS user so it a bit of a rough guess, but I think you need to look at either a hardware problem, bad drive sector, or a corruption of a DP file. I do not know how FreeDOS manages sharing but perhaps this is the area to look at. I do not think that the sheer number of users should itself be the problem, but problems are more likely to happen when multiple users access the data simulataneously. The only DP corruption issus I have ever faces is when the network client was trying to cache writes.
Regards Brian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcos Favero Florence de Barros Sent: Friday, 15 June 2012 7:37 AM To: DataPerfect Users Discussion Group Subject: [Dataperf] Networking DP Hi, The DP database I developed for the public Health Center in my neighbourhood has been running perfectly for 6 years. Users now decided to expand the number of computers from 4 to 8, and connect them all into a network. I was very confident that the network would run smoothly because of previous experience: for about 3 years we also had computers networked in pairs, and they ran all day long, every day, without a single complaint. This is in real hardware -- not virtualized --, mostly early Pentiums donated to us. The operating system is FreeDOS, which I also use at home for nearly all my work. The network software is MS-Client. Trouble started three days ago. We have to add 15,000 new records, so I again networked a pair of computers in order to allow two persons to work simultaneously. The network does work, but it is in a very fragile condition. As soon as the two people start using the database more intensively, say, doing lots of lookups, the whole system crashes -- server and client. The server error message is "General failure reading drive C", which I suppose is from FreeDOS. In the client it is DataPerfect error # 114. I will ask the FreeDOS users group about that, but before writing to them I wanted to check with the DataPerfect group in order to know exactly what we can expect from networked DP databases. So my basic questions today are: Assuming a network is working properly, can we use DataPerfect any way we like? Can two or more users, say, navigate the lookups at will, as quickly as they like? Or is there any limitation? The only difference I can think of between the networks that worked well for years and today's is that the former were used basically by a doctor at the office and his/her assistant at the reception desk, which is a light load on the system, whereas today we are trying to use both machines intensively. Any comments will be much appreciated. Marcos -------------------------------------- Marcos Fávero Florence de Barros Campinas, Brazil _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
