Well, I am trying to avoid the cost of WIN2K and the licenses. The problem is that they have a bunch of users, and of course the more they spend in hardware and other software, the less they can spend on mine.

>>This almost a hardware question, but it relates to client/server, so I hope I can get some ideas from somebody here. I am about to propose to a client to upgrade to a simple client/server setup using DCOM for some of their slowest tasks. They don't want to spend the money to go with SQL server, and they have a Novell server.
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>>My idea is to have a dedicated PC running windows (my DCOM server), receive the DCOM requests act on them (using the database on the novell server), and then return a temporary table (in the Novell server) for the client to access. This of course would only be beneficial if there is a way to connect the DCOM server to the novell server in such a way that it would have quick access to the data (without the traffic go out on the rest of the network). I don't know much about routers, but I would think that there is away to isolate the traffic and to connect the Novell server with the DCOM server in such a way to increase the throughput.
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>You can add an extra network card on the server and connect it via a switch (not a hub) or cross-over cable to your PC running your server application. This will give this PC the fastest connectivity.
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>However, IMO, you are not talking about a big gain in this case unless the following is true:
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>1. You have 10 MBit for the rest of the LAN and 100 MBit for this one PC. For obvious reasons, the speed is definitely going to increase here.
>2. If you already use 100 MBit and you have a large number of users connected via daisy chanined hubs to a network card in the server then you will see some improvement because the packet resends won't be occurring because of collisions.
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>Otherwise, the data is still remote and you still have to download things over the wire to do any processing. Can your client go with an NT/W2K server? That way you can make a true DCOM server and the processing could be done locally at the server.