>>>>>Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>>A prospective customer is asking if he can store my VFP 9 application on NAS (Windows Storage Server 2012). I just read about this NAS online which seems to me should work. But my question is, if anybody used NAS, how do local PCs "see" this NAS? As a server drive?
>>>>
>>>>Yes.
>>>>
>>>>>For example, does NAS have C: drive where I can create a folder (e.g. MyApp) and copy application files to it? Will then local PCs have access to this folder as e.g. \\NasServerName\MyApp?
>>>>
>>>>Yes, assuming your folder MyApp has been shared with a share name "MyApp" and permissions have been set appropriately.
>>>
>>>These are two very helpful Yeses (sp?). Thank you. I am wondering, whey did the customer say that he needs an 8 foot rack for this NAS. Did I misunderstood? He said, otherwise this NAS would have to be sitting on the floor.
>>
>>Some NASs for home or very small office use are small-form-factor boxes. For mid-size business and up they are often rack-mount. If he's out of space on his current rack(s) or doesn't have any at all, he'll need to put in another one, or have it lying around somewhere like a pizza box.
>
>Al
>What kind of software does an NAS device need to support a small file sharing application like Dimitry's?
>(I have a client with a similar need)

All NASs have file-sharing support built in.

Most NASs are really just Linux computers. They typically run the Samba daemon to provide SMB/CIFS file services so Windows hosts "see" them as Windows shared drives. For Samba on Linux NASs it's wise to be wary storing VFP data on them; Samba's emulation of Windows SMB is not always exact and/or a given NAS's Samba configuration may be oriented more towards benchmark performance than reliability.

I believe John Fabiani has extensively run Linux/Samba servers for storing VFP data with great success. I had some experience about 10 years ago trying to run a VFP5 app against Samba on OpenBSD/FreeBSD, we had a lot of corruption problems that only went away when we moved the VFP data to an old NT4 server the client happened to have lying around.

I have another client with a fairly high-end QNAP NAS. I tried using it as a target for Windows Backup from a Server 2012 box but it didn't work. Some research found that by default Samba on that NAS was set to store files in "sparse" mode which apparently is not acceptable for Windows Backup.

I've given these two examples just to show that Linux-based NASs may have to be tweaked from their factory settings in order to work well with VFP or other Windows applications. As I've said before many times, a multi-user VFP application is a stern test of SMB and network infrastructure, so Samba settings should be set for reliability rather than performance. Ironically, these days with SMB2.x/3.x on true Windows servers, it seems various settings have to be tweaked for reliability with file-based databases such as VFP and MS Access, you may have seen various SMB2-related threads here.

In Dmitry's case it seems the NAS in question is actually Windows-based rather than Linux so I expect he'll have fewer (if any) issues.

In your case it might be worth asking whether it would be better to use a regular Windows server rather than a NAS:

- if they don't currently have a server, would it be valuable to put one in e.g. Windows Server 2012 Essentials? This can be a beneficial upgrade to a peer-to-peer network

- if they already have a server, is there room and performance to install your data?