File Locking under Windows - a solution ?

[Stuart Halliday]

> Does anyone know of a way this locking can be overridden ? - is it
> possible to 'force' updates ? it is important that all live servers
> have identical filesystems.

I doubt it.
Windows Filing system doesn't work that way.

You can buy open file managers. But these are designed to allow a file
that is opened by another application to be copied not replaced.

Are you talking html/bitmap files or data base files?

Are you using IIS? IIS does have a cache control on pages IIRC. You tried
switching that on?

I'm an Apache user myself, can't say I've ever had a problem with open files.


What you can do is have a script that monitors open files.

I use the program psFile by sysinternals to return a list of open files.

So when an opened file is found and then closed by the web server the
script could swap the old file with the updated one.

Not to difficult to write in the usual scripting manner.

Bigger systems of course use clustering to do 'live' update of a web site.