Database File Corruption on Novell Networks
The following are a series of generalisations about Novell Netware based
networks which reflect our experiences. Novell's client32 software seems to
be up upgraded at frequent intervals and hence these generalisations could
be out of date quickly.
Here is our
disclaimer.
- Novell's Client32 client seems to be slower than Microsoft's Netware client supplied with Windows 95 and 98.
- Novell maintains a number of different releases of Client32. Each have their own patches and hotfixes. It seems to be useful to ensure that your particular version of Client32 has the latest patch. These can be obtained from Novell Patches & Files.
- It seems to be useful to ensure the Frame Type is set to a specific frame type rather than 'Auto'. For one of our sites this was a magic cure. The clients kept dropping connections to the server, causing corruption to the database. Once this change was applied to each workstation, they haven't missed a beat.
- Setting File Cache Level to Zero in the advanced settings of Client32 is important for Multi-user Databases.
- Look at Novell's document 10013992 How to- Troubleshooting file corruption. This covers a number of advanced Client32 settings which may aid tracking down file corruption. They haven't helped us directly however, because the problems have turned out to something else usually.
- Be suspicious of Anti-Virus Software. Some Anti-Virus software seems to be too aggressive in check files causing database programs to behave badly. In the past we have seen: spontaneous reboots, very very slow response times and corrupted files caused by the interaction of anti-virus software with database software. Try disabling the continuous checking of files to see if that solves corruption problems.
