>Hi Gang,
>
>I've recently run into a couple of problems that I thought I'd share with those of you responsible for FPW apps running under Novell's Client 32 (Versions 2.2 and 3.0). From what I've been able to determine, this is an extremely unstable situation, and if someone were to ask what I'm planning to do, I'd say, "Port to VFP 6.0 as quickly as possible.
>
>Many of us know about problems involving a "Watcom386 Read Error" when attempting to start FPW on a machine that's been running for awhile. I've also encountered and heard of problems involving corrupted indexes. Here are two more for the list.
>
>This first one isn't that big a deal, but it indicates that "something's rotten in Denmark" (no offense to our Danish friends intended). I had a small table (less than 1,000 records) with a single field indexed. I re-built the index from scratch and it went from about 7Kb to 12Kb. When did I a REINDEX, back to 7Kb.
>
>This second one, is a real dangerous one and something folks should be aware of. I have a medium-small table containing about 29K records, and around 4Mb in size. This table has 13 index tags, and the CDX file size was around 2Mb. After issuing a PACK, regardless of whether or not records were marked for deletion, the records following the record pointer (5 or 6 of them) were turned to garbage. When I reduced the size of this table by about half, this behavior no longer exhibited itself. I cannot say with any certanty what the point is that this behavior starts to occur, but numerous tests continued to indicate that it's there, and it happens regardless of whether or not the table is located locally or on a server.
>
>All I can say is if you're responsible for any FPW apps under Client 32, do not hesitate to upgrade to VFP as soon as possible. I was not able to replicate this behavior under VFP 6.0, and I'd assume that 5.0 is also OK.
>
>Thanks for your attention.

If it is at all possible, use MS's client for Netware. We have had a problem with Novell's client for over a year. Versions tested 2.2,2.5,3.0,3.01,3.02. None of them work. Os is Windows95. Application written in VFP5 The Novell client for Windows NT WS ver 4.5 works Ok as long as you don't have a 3.12 server.
We have an open ticket with Novell, and they haven't a clue. They keep telling us to upgrade... 5 versions later, the thing still doesn't work. We have tried to tell them that the client for NT works fine, but there must be a completely different group that works on that one <s>.

Wayne
PS If you need NDS support, MS does support it.