Hi

The application was a legacy app originally written in DOS for Clipper. It was fairly common at one time for programmers to set up a semaphore system to assure multiuser access to records. When I became involved, the application had been converted to VFP3 with with the original architecture left pretty much intact. File and record locking were tied to the workstation which attempted to write/update records.

We had unexplained workstation lockups and File Access denied. Not always the same machine and not reproducable. The problem would also seem to clear itself. After a lot of hair pulling we found that the Server was 'seeing' two different physical machines with the same workstation ID. Most of the time things would run just fine, but under the right circumstances the record or file lock was not being released. This only happened on Novell servers, no problems on NT servers.

We solved the problem by adding code to make sure each workstation logon was unique.

You probably don't have to deal with a legacy semaphore issue or even this exact issue. BUT the point here is that Novell treated record locking just differently enough from NT to cause the problem you described.


- Don Lowrey