is strict locking necessary??

[Stephen L Arnold]

On 13 Mar 99, "Dr Hugh Nelson" <hugh.nelson at ausinfo.com.au> had 
questions about is strict locking necessary??:  

> we have 13 win95 clients running vb4 and vb5 applications accessing a M$
> Access database on our Samba share.

I'd say that's pushing it.  Access scales like crap after 2-3 users 
(it's a "desktop" product).

> I got the impression that some file errors were occurring 

Can you be more specific?

> and put strict locking = yes into smb.conf
> Our speed is not real good, and I would like to be faster.

Strict locking will definitely slow things down.  You should only 
need it if you're editing the same files from both the host side 
and the windoze/samba side.  Oplocks are what you want for windoze 
clients working with an Access file on a samba share (Access should 
handle file locking on it's own).  However, Access is *not* a real 
multi-user database.  For instance, you won't be able to do roll-
backs, etc, like you can with the real thing (eg, MySQL, 
PostgreSQL, Oracle, even M$ SQLServer).

I'd recommend converting the Access database to SQL tables (fairly 
trivial) and using the win32 ODBC or JDBC stuff to work with MySQL 
or PostgreSQL.  Or you could do the cool web front-end (and handle 
multiple client OS's, etc).  Better speed, better security, more 
flexible and robust (and free, except for your time).  There are 
also perl and PHP modules (with SQL hooks) for apache.  Probably 
already there if your samba box runs linux...

> Am I running a risk if I disable strict locking??

Only the normal risk you incur from using M$ products ;-)

More OpenSource evangelism from Steve, apprentice propeller head 
and nerd wannabe...


*************************************************************
Steve Arnold                     http://www.rain.org/~sarnold

Fatal exception error:  (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)lush Windoze...