All,

Thanks to all of you who replied and thanks for the help. I have since had a quick look at ODBC's as I wasn't aware of their remote connection features. Anyway, they should do the trick.

Cheers,

Mike.


>>I need a little bit of advice. I want to be able to query a database from
>a VFP 3.0 app. running on Windows NT 4.0 over a Novell 4.0 network. The only
>problem is that the database resides on a HP UNIX machine. I thought about
>programatically controlling a Telnet session to the UNIX box through a DDE
>interface but I don't know if this is the right way to go. Apart from that
>I can't find any documentation for DDE on the standard Windows Telnet app.
>>
>As was stated previously, a little more information here would help us to
>answer your question.
>
>I am able to query an Informix database on an HP UNIX server any time I
>please. I have VFP 3.0
>sitting on my PC which runs Novell 3.11 and uses Novell's LAN Workplace for
>DOS to supply
>the niceties of a flavor of TCP/IP to get to the UNIX world. The important
>part though is the ODBC
>driver that I have loaded on my PC client to get me to "talk" to the
>Informix database. While I
>got my OPBC driver from Informix directly (so I could avoid fingerpointing
>in case problems came
>up), you can get those same drivers from companies such as Intersolv. See
>http://www.intersolv.com/
>and look for references to their DataDirect drivers. Also, you will need
>the middleware stuff that
>Informix, Oracle, etc. require for you to have. Informix has I-Net, Oracle
>has SQL*Net, and I'm sure
>the others have similar unattractive names for their middleware. Once you
>have these items, you're
>ready to install.
>
>Of course, the DBA for the back-end database needs to give you permission to
>get to the database.
>But, if you are already able to login to it from a telnet or the like,
>you're already done from that end.
>The other possible gotcha (as it was on my PC) is to make sure the tcp/ip
>service has a reference
>to your back-end db engine in your local "hosts" file. I had everything set
>except for that when I went
>from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, and I could not see the error of my ways.
>It was very frustrating
>to know that what worked on Win3.11 did not work under the later technology.
>
>At any rate, I hope these thoughts help some.