Sharing Database - Windows/XP

[Robert Heller]

At Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:25:49 -0400 Phillip Richcreek <pwrichcreek at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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.

'NFS' (as mentioned below) is a *UNIX* network file system (sharing
files across multiple *unix* computers on a network).

> 
> 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?

I would suspect that two UNIX/Linux computers, using NFS would not have
any problem with sharing a GnuCash file (one at a time!) over NFS (or
one local, the other NFS).

> 
> 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. Â 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. Â Does MS-Windows let
> >> you do that? Â 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
> >
> 
>                                                                                                                    

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