Disappearing Flag Settings

[fwiebur]

Heres one that has me stumpted. Recently,I migrated the agency's, I work for, primary production server from NetWare 5.0 to NetWare 6.0. After the migration everything seem to be functioning properly.

This agency has a staff of application programmers who develop custom applications for it and this software has always be very well behaved. As new applications are developed and moved into the production world the file attribute for the data files are set to "shareable, read/write" as at any given time as many as 500 users could be accessing the data. Not a problem

My problem began approximately two week ago and that is that the file attributes are somehow changing as the users use the data. When the file attributes get changed and multiple individual attempt to access the data file, not record, they suffer a lockup. When this first happened I check and found that the "shareable" attribute was missing. I then reflagged the data file and everything worked normal again, until the next time the "shareable" attribute disappeared.

For the past two week I have come in early to check the file attributes and reflag the data files if needed. With in just a few minutes of workers beginning to use the data files the "shareable" flag disappears. This happens even though the programs that accesses these data files are designed to open the files in a read mode only, they cannot make changes to the data.

If anyone has any suggestion as to where to look for a cause and solution to this problem I would certainly appreciate hearing about it.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Mark826]

We're basically having the same problem as this post - Has anyone found a solution to this yet?

Thanks

 

[marvhuffaker]

Apply NW6SP3, NW6NSS3C, and make sure the following are in your AUTOEXEC.NCF file. reboot server.

SET CLIENT FILE CACHING ENABLED = OFF
SET LEVEL 2 OPLOCKS ENABLED = OFF

This will fix your problems, unless you have some compress files that are corrupt, then you need to look into using COMPFIX to find and correct any problems.

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[fwiebur]

Marvin,

Thanks for the suggestion. As you recommended I updated the service patch on the server and installed the nss3c service patch as well. I have also keyed in the lines of instructions in to the NCF file, but I still have the same problem.

While speaking with another CNE yesterday, he seems to think that the problem may stem from the fact that the agency I work for runs custom software, written in the COBOL language and that the data files may not be compatible with Novell's NSS storage system.

I have to admit, that this problem began right after we had upgraded our servers from 5.0 to 6.0 and we went from traditional volume structure to NSS volume structure.

I am still trying to find a solution, other that blowing away my server and installing traditional volume.

I would appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Thanks again.

 

[marvhuffaker]

I have one client that has a similar problem. They have an oddball custom app that just doesn't run well on NSS. I think that it is probably possible to tune NSS so the app will in fact run, but in this case it is easier to just go back to traditional volumes. So in your case, putting Traditional volumes on is probably your best solution.



Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[fwiebur]

Marvin,

Thanks for the quick response. Next question, can you give me a starting point to begin researching how to tune NSS to let these type apps run.

Again, thanks for the timely response.

Floyd Wieburg

 

[marvhuffaker]

There's a great appnote that goes into NSS in detail and explains it all. That would be the best place to start.

http://developer.novell.com/research/appnotes/2002/a0207.htm

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[fwiebur]

Marvin,

Thanks for the assistance. I will let you know how it turns out.