Hi,

I'm running winxp clients with a redhat 8.0 server. However when we placed a piece of software on the linux share drive we notice that we couldnt access from more than one terminal at a time. I've come to the conclusion that its a problem with the .mdb file.

Ive done many searches on the web but have found nothing about this anyone else had this problem? If anyone has got any ideas about this... ?

Cheers

Not too sure whether this could be the cause, but I know Access databases can be either single-user or multi-user. Perhaps yours is single-user?

That shouldn't be it. In general, an access database "should" support about 10 concurrent users. Overall, it would be best to move the data into MySQL and use a web-interface to the DB or re-write the db-access code in the front end application to use MySQL instead of MSAccess. If Access is used as the front end, you could also install the MyODBC drivers & create a database that links to the tables stored in MySQL on the Redhat server.

Other than that, this is most likely something to do with the settings in Samba. Perhaps someone here knows the correct settings to use. I'm sure it has something to do with file locking.

I second Burke's comments - ideally you would move this data into a mySQL database and migrate to a *real* database.

Of course, this may or may not be welcome news. I believe your problem is that Windows is attempting to do 'byte locking' on your database file - that is, someone opens the file and requests some data. The part of the file that contains that data is locked, and the rest left open for other people doing different operations on other parts of the data.

The number of users it can support is generally proportional to the size of the data - if one person is working on record X, no-one else can work on it regardless of anything else. But they can work on record Y if no-one else is using it. The 10 concurrent users is a limit of NT4 Workstation which has a max number of users set at 10.

Here's a link to the samba documentation which goes into it a bit, but doesn't really help.
http://de.samba.org/samba/ftp/docs/h...on.html#AEN199

All in all, I don't think there's much you can do. I don't think Samba handles it very well, and your best bet is to either :

1) move the file to a Windows share.
2) move the data into a mySQL database (which is actually altogether a *much* better option. But conversely alot more work).

Slick.