[plug] Dosemu

[Garth Atkinson]

Brad

Dataflex could have the best 'native locking' this side of Uranus and
multiple Dosemu sessions will still corrupt the shared files. Give
Dosemu a wide berth. Someone suggested vmware, running just dos
sessions, also DAVID (lloy0076) suggested looking at dataflex under
linux. These are maybe workable solutions BUT dosemu is not!!!

Unless:
Within each dosemu session you can load some virtual network filesystem
layer (NOT lredir) like net.exe or ms-net, that will attach to a
(locally) shared filesystem. This solution was not available 18 months
ago but it might be now.

Garth

Brad Campbell wrote:
> 
> Garth Atkinson wrote:
> >
> > Hi Brad
> >
> > From pure curiosity what is the name of the accounting package?
> 
> Arrow, it's written in DataFlex.
> 
> > Your dosemu approach is doomed. Multiple DOSEMU sessions will not
> > properly synchronise their access to the underlying file system (are you
> > using redir ?). Even if the underlying filesystem did the best job that
> > it could with file locking, the dosemu session will buffer some
> > reads/writes that will probably bring the whole setup crashing down.
> 
> Spewing to say the least :p)
> I'm not using redir at all, dosemu looks at tht ext2 drive natively.
> 
> > I messed with this stuff for about a month before going bald. I ended up
> > using Caldera OpenDOS (Y2K OK) on each workstation (using Novel drivers)
> > with Linux running that excellent freeware Novel Server package (name
> > eludes me) as a server.
> 
> Yuk, for this application, I wanted to centralise for bandwidth reasons,
> so
> moving back to a distributed aproach is not an option.
> I'm doing some research into the native locking Dataflex uses to see if
> it
> will solve my problems.. I have a feeling it will.
> 
> > You might try to install microsoft networking in each dosemu session and
> > map a network drive (unfortunately Linux cant be using the network card
> > for this to work). The data synchronisation rules change with networked
> > file systems (I think - but not with redir).
> >
> > Kudos to dosemu developers for the way they implemented LPT? capturing.
> > Very clever.
> 
> Yeah, it's quite nice really.
> 
> I'll run some checks and see how it goes. I have done a contra with the
> guy who supports the package in WA, he will show me how to set up
> dataflex
> for this type of environment and I will show him how to setup a linux
> box
> to do all this.. Somehow I feel he's getting the better deal as I'm not
> getting paid for any of this :p|
>