[Samba] FoxPro on Samba share

[Nikola Vanevski]

Ok, I'm sure you've answered this more then once, but still here it is : 
I have a FoxPro 2.0 for Lan application that used to run on DOS boxes 
connected to a Novell server (and of course with Novel client). Both 
FoxPro .exe, .prg and database/index files reside on the shared disk, 
and the client only maps a shared drive and starts the FoxPro 
application from there. Due to some licensing issues, I have decided to 
move the application on a Linux server with Samba shared drive and 
connect the DOS machines using the Microsoft Network Client 3.0 (disks 
generated by NT4 server). Here are the problems I encountered :

1. FoxPro executable (FOXL.EXE) would not start - it would hang on the 
introduction screen. It would, however, start from the local disk and 
open the database filed residing on the shared drive - albeit slow. I 
have turned off the strict locking and turned on the oplocks, but it 
didn't help. What helped was turning the locks off completely  - FoxPro 
then started to run from the network disk. What happened next is very 
interesting - I turned locks on back again and restarted smbd, and Fox 
continued to run! This seems to have solved the problem with running the 
executable itself, but I don't know if I should think of it as solved. 
Any further suggestions on this?

2. Allthough file name handling is set to "case insensitive", 
FoxPro+Samba combination seems to intruduce some case sensitivity - for 
example, "compile *.prg" behaves differently from "compile *.PRG" - the 
former say that files are not found, but the latter compiles them 
without errors. Any suggestions on this too?

3. And, as always, the speed problem. Inserting records into a DBF 
database via the FoxPro application is painfully slow - more then one 
second per record. I have seen various client tuning tips, but most of 
them were using Windows registry - none covered DOS networking client. 
Can you help me with this?

Thanks in advance !!

Nino