Sharing Database - Windows/XP

[Phillip Richcreek]

Geert,

I had just summarized and re-stated my question before seeing your
reply; so I did not (could not!) incorporate your reply in my
restatement. I think it does, however, go to the heart of the issue.
I'm no Windows expert, but I believe there are locking mechanisms
available for the ntfs file system that (I believe) Windows/XP uses in
the limited network environment that I am running.

Given that (I imagine) Windows/XP does not comprise a significant part
of the GnuCash user community, I can understand that this shared user
issue would not be a major concern for the GnuCash development team.
Nevertheless, would it be instructive and/or helpful if were to put
together some code/scripts to explore the effect of available locking
mechanisms in my environment?

Then again, I suppose the important question is whether GnuCash, in
ANY platform, is designed to support the kind of limited multi-process
access that I'm asking about. Do you know the answer to that?

Phil(R)

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Geert Janssens
<janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 April 2010, Robert Heller wrote:
>> At Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:42:32 -0700 (PDT) Phil Longstaff
> <plongstaff at rogers.com> wrote:
>> > I don't know if this is related to bug
>> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352491 or not.
>>
>> I just did some experiments on my Linux box.  GnuCash creates a single
>> file with *two* names (trivial to do under UNIX with a UNIX-flavored
>> file system -- just a matter of fun with the link(2) system service).
>> The .LCK and .LNK files refer to the *same* inode.  Does MS-Windows let
>> you do that?  And does the NETBIOS protocol support such magic?
>>
> For windows this doesn't matter. The .LCK and .LNK functionality is explicitly
> disabled on Windows systems. That code was added to deal with nfs locking
> issues. Nfs is (assumed) not (to be) available on Windows, so the extra code
> is not compiled in that platform.
>
> But it might indeed be relevant when accessing your data file from a linux box
> over netbios (via samba), when the code is enabled, while NETBIOS doesn't
> support such tricks.
>
> Geert
>