>>I am at the point in my application development that I want to use Universal Naming Conventions versus drive letters for our Novell VFP system. Does anyone have any advice or precautions, or any tools that they can point me to that will ease my transition from drive letters to UNC. Also don't be afraid to tell me that I should keep drive letter mappings and that UNC has major problems in VFP 6.0 still. I am just looking for some advice from others who may have gone doen this road already.
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>>TIA
>
>One thing I found, I don't know if anybody else has told you this. Two commands in VFP: SET DEFAULT TO and IF FILE() - these will not work in VFP on Novell unless you have previously accessed the servers in the UNC call. Try this:
>
>Switch on your PC - WITHOUT mapping to a particular server.
>In the VFP command window: type SET DEFAULT TO \\... - the non-mapped server.
>Mine can't find that directory.
>Next...
>Pick a file you know is on that server and type
>?FILE(\\...) - the known file on the server.
>Mine can't find that file and returns false!
>
>Now, go to Windows Explorer and double click on the particular server - don't map any drives to it.
>
>Do the above tests again and it works!!!
This is not a problem with the use of UNCs; it has to do with how your Novell network is set up. Novell 3.1x and 4.x in bindery emulation mode requires you to log into the server, one server at a time, either by explicit login or attachment. Attempting to map a resource (printer or drive) or examine the details of shared resources on a Netware server forces the login, but a simple UNC reference does not. A Novell server managed through an NT domain or via NDS is logged in when the domain or tree is accessed, avoiding the problem neatly. If you ATTACH the servers in your NetWare login script (as opposed to actually mapping a resource) you'll find that UNCs for the Attached servers will resolve normally.
>
>I use UNC everywhere now and have found some problems (we have nine servers here on three sites and I don't have any drives mapped). I found these problems recently - only on Novell, apparently, this does not happen on NT networks.
