>>>My company is about to buy a new server and upgrade our server software. Currently we are running Netware 3.12. It has worked flawlessly for the past 4 or 5 years running FoxPro 2.x and VFP3, VFP5, and now VFP6. However, our 486 server has no room for new hardware and we are out of server licenses. Thus we're about to buy a new Compaq Proliant 800/350e or HP E60 and upgrade our server software. We're contemplating either Netware for Small Business 4.2 or (gulp) Microsoft NT 4. For stability reasons, we're leaning towards choosing Netware.
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>>>Any comments?
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>>Rixon,
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>>I've found Netware 4.x/Client 32 to be less than desirable, especially with versions of FoxPro.
>>
>>Client 32 has a nasty habit of corrupting data in FoxPro Tables. This is a documented bug, and if you do a search on the Novell site (for FoxPro), you'll find that they say it will be fixed in Netware 5. I've also noted that it has problems opening large tables (sometimes fails), and fails to release file handles.
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>>We're in the process of setting up an NT server specifically so that we can use SQL Server. Unfortunately, since I don't have any experience with it, it's difficult for me to appropriately comment on it.
>
>Hi Rixin and George.
>
>Just to balance what George says. We have had two DBC corruptions in 5 years of using Netware 3.11 to the latest Netware 4.x .These happened in the few weeks after an upgrade, then things settled down. The client 32 is a bit large and has only bitten us with 1 problem (after upgrading to VFP6), we could no longer store and edit source code (forms in particular) on the server since there a file locking problems. One of our tables is approaching 1 million records with no problems. Plus the netware server can run 2 to 3 years (or more) with out needing to reboot. We would have gone longer but we downed the servers to upgrade them to new versions. Part of this success is due to a crack team of CNEs that we have here.

Geez, can we hire these guys for a couple days? <g> We are dealing with a corruption problem currently and have an open ticket w/Novell. As a matter of fact, we have tried everything in both M$ & Novell support documents and nothing helped. We have been getting a two-byte shift (or more) in random records in random tables. Usually the shift affects several records in a row that correlate to an index order.

Frankly, I'm not convinced the Client32 has anything to do with this. I personally reloaded every Win95/98 machine we have on site from scratch and used the Microsoft Client and we still had corruption. We are running Novell 4.10 on Dell PowerEdge 2300 servers. The only reduction in corrupt records came when we forced the servers to half-duplex, and cut all of the SCSI bus speed in half. Our experiences have proven (I think) that database corruption on Novell has a lot more to do with hardware than it does the client. We've used both clients with the same results - so now we are back to Client32 and figure on going to Netware 5.0 I am becoming convinced that it is a combo of the fast hardware (PII, PCI bus, 100mbit NIC's) running NOS that were not designed to run on this type of equipment. I say this since the only relief we have had from corrupt records is to throttle the network back to half speed. Things run pitifully slower, but we are getting almost no corruption - very seldom now.

Joe Miller
jmill@ezo.net