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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.

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.

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.

Garth

Brad Campbell wrote:
> 
> G'day all
> Any Dosemu experts out there?
> 
> I'm just migrating a company's dos-based accounting package
> to linux.
> They used to run localy but off a shared drive, this gets a
> little slow when processing databases of over 60mb on a
> 10BaseT network, so I'm running everything centralised with
> dosemu.
> The users shells are set to /usr/bin/dos
> and when they log in they go straight into dos and a menuing
> system, the printer ports are run thru lpr to a remote linux
> printer server. Works like a charm..
> anyway, my question is about file locking. I'm assuming that
> the multiple dos sessions will play nicely because they are
> accessing data on an ext2 partition and the FS will lock them
> as it would lock normal programs trying to write to the same
> file.. Is this the case ?
> 
> And as an aside, anyone know of a good telnet program for
> Win95 that supports the full PC Character set ? Lines and
> all that ?. I have an early version of Netterm, but it does
> not have the right fonts..
> 
> --
> Brad....
> "The ultimate result is that some innovations that would
> truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason
> that they do not conincide with Microsoft's self-interest"
> - Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
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