>>Ed,
>>My special thanks to you for heads up. If you remember the thread of Bret, he was asking a way to know who is actively using the app tables on the network. After your message about fcreate(AtServer) to get a common datetime I totally changed my schema :) Thanks.
>>Cetin
>
>I am glad my can of worms helped someone. We tossed around Ed's file creation answer and the only down thing we can think of is that the overhead in time that would be taken to create a file, check its datetime, then delete the file. We also have seen in the past that Novell does not release files very fast in order that they may be deleted. We have had code that wrote to a temporary table, then when it was done issued a USE on it, then immediately did an ERASE tempfilename and received the error FILE IN USE. If we put a wait in between the USE and ERASE of lets say 2-3 seconds then Novell would release the file for deletion. I guess we can always leave temp files in a temp directory and have a process clean out old files nightly and thus avoid the erase part of the equation. But I digress, have a good day Cetin

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Bret,
Up to date the worst Novell network I have seen had at least 50K/sec read/write speed and generally no less than 450K/sec. At least you live with a speed needed to read/write fox tables. File create, check routine is very fast and should be too in Novell (dropped using 3-4 years ago). A simple one is :

lcMyServerFile = lcMyServerDBFSPath+"\"+sys(2015)+".tmp"
handle=fcreate(lcMyServerFile)
=fclose(handle)
lcDate = fdate(lcMyServerFile)
lcTime = ftime(lcMyServerFile)
erase (lcMyServerFile)

OTOH since it's Novell you have another option. You might query server time (SysTime) using Novell netware API. The API SDK was on their site. You could even check the files a particular station is opened, read/writes to files etc. (easy to say :) I had ASM code in FoxDOS days that doing some Novell query but now I cannot use "load","call" commands in Fox :(
Cetin