Hello, I support a legacy applic

[taylor5pak]

Hello,

I support a legacy application on FWP26a win version. All the development is on a win95 computer and the exe is created here as well... We currently have users on Win 95/98 and Win2000 and were on a Novell server... We resolved all the errors, applied all patches and all was hunky dory ... The users access the app via a mapped drive. We currently moved from Novell to a Nas device, win2000, I am not sure of the SP... During testing all was wonderful. We only were able to test with 3 users but there we no errors at all... I even ran a heavey update job that prints ~300 order as the other two were pouncing away.. This weekend all the users were brought in, we went live today. We have maybe 6 superusers that update and punch away... The other users connect in intermittently thruout the day or launch the app and leave it minimized until they need it. Work went from 7:30 am until 8:45 am and all the user machines locked up in the immediate area I was in... The major databases were corrupt and needed reindexing and we began to get many alias errors.. After repairing all was fine and they began to work again, again about 20 minutes later, all froze and again damage done to the db's...

My main question would be - does anyone know of any issues with running FPW26a apps on various Win95/Win98/Win2000 PC's and a Win2000 Server .

Also note security - if certain users were not given the correct rights to this new device and mapping would it cause the system to lock up across the board

if just one user did not have the correct rights could it cause an error that can cause everything to not function at all ...

I am lost here - - All testing went fine - -

Any advice?
Please respond asap as this is a production environment...
Thank You

 

[TomKane]

hi Taylor,

It's a long time since I've worked on Foxpro and am not as au fait with the detail as I once was. The thing is I've been it situations similar to your own and I know what it's like (I think we all do) and can empathise/sympathise. I've a few questions that I hope might get the ball rolling:

Are you in a position to go back to your old set up until you find the problem - if you can that will probably take the pressure off a bit - even parallel running might help take a bit of pressure off.

Are you using TCP/IP or SPX/IPX? Do you have a network "sniffer" these can be used to see if there are problems with your network that might be causing these problems.

Are you using Foxpro for Windows or Foxpro for DOS?

What are the PC configurations like? Is there enough conventional and upper memory available (if DOS). Are there enough files handles in the config.nt (or config.sys or whatever it's calling itself these days) - is there anything "untoward" in either the config or autoexec.

Could there be conflicts with other apps that weren't there in the testing environment? Was the testing done on the same kind of hardware as is in the production environment?

What kind of are you doing record locking or file locking (or both) in your app? Are there a lot of tables and indicies in your app and is there a lot of i/o activity in your files?

Do you have access to the source code? Or is there a vendor involved? If there is a vendor, have you been in touch with them? If you have the source code it might be worth your while recreating the exe on the new platform to see if that helps.

If you're moving from Novell to Windows 2000 it might be worth your while to export the data out of your tables and create the tables/indices and import the data in on the new platform. Not to mention creating the new exe?

You need to get the exact error messages that are being returned and do a search in this forum and forum184 to see if there are any other occurances of your errors and how to deal with them - I think it would also be worth doing a search in google as well.

There used to be a utility called foxfix that could be used to repair foxpro tables - do you have any specialist utilities? Maybe you could search google to see what's out there (and this forum as well).

If you have access to the source code it could be well worth your while to introduce logging into your apps so that you can see what people are doing and you may even see if there are any patterns emerging.

Best of luck,
Tom

 

[TomKane]

Also, you should get in contact with your hardware vendor in case they can suggest anything and in relation to the "loggin" of activities in your app you might find this useful thread655-548201

Again, best of luck - (let us know how you get on)

 

[rgbean]

Besides all of Tom's suggestions, make sure your W2000 server is at least on SP 3 if they aren't using SCSI hard drives. (There were buffering issues that were addressed in SP 2 & 3 for some controllers / motherboard combinations. See

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...port/kb/articles/Q281/6/72.asp&NoWebContent=1

- "Possible Data Loss After You Enable the "Write Cache Enabled" Feature&quot Note: Some have reported problems with SP 4 that weren't happening under SP3.

Also, you may want to check into the whole world of opportunistic locking. The following articles refer to NT, but nothing was changed in W2K, so this still applies.

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...port/kb/articles/q129/2/02.asp&NoWebContent=1

- "PC Ext: Explanation of Opportunistic Locking on Windows NT" and

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q306981

- "Level II Oplocks Are Not Granted After a File Is Locked".

One more thing that can contribute to "hanging" is mis-configured Virus software. It's critical that if there is a Virus checker running on a workstation or server that it be configured to NOT actively check standard FoxPro files (.DBF, .FPT, .CDX) and on developer systems all the other file types.
The basic information also applies to other AV apps depending on how they are implemented and how they can be configured. -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;321550

- "HOWTO: Optimize Visual FoxPro Applications While Using Norton AntiVirus 2002"

Rick

 

[AnanthaP]

One more suggestion is to try it one at time. First, please change the OS only (to W2000) and keep the data on the computer.

If it works, you know its a NAS problem.

end

 

[taylor5pak]

Hello all,

First off I would like to just say thanks to all who replied... Please excuse me for not responding sooner as this was a production issue and we reconfigured everyone yesterday... The issue is currently resolved... We actually moved off of one Win2000 Server running EMC to just a Windows2000 Server... The issue was definately rights related though the group who handles the rights can't seem to understand what they did wrong... They created a folder called apps and a group called foxprog, another group called repair etc.

Some in the repair also must be in foxprog.. At the top level of the apps they assigned deny at the next directory down they gave full rights... Mapped 4 different shares with overlapping users in all groups... Once someone was in the application and happend to minimize and work on something else in the other folder where the apps directory had deny they would get a access denied message or in this case the application just froze and of course the db is corrupt.. Anothe scenerio I noticed was even locally they had denied them access to update on any of their local drives... Again, this was an issue... Rights I believe is all this was ...

I went back to Friday's backup on to the new Windows2000 server, had someone else set up the shares who handled our prior Netware server, had all users on the system within an hour and no errors, except unable to process once in a while because I need to go over the set print statements since we went from Novell to Windows 2000.. But we can continue, this other rights issue literally locked everyone up...

Thank you again for all your advice.

 

[taylor5pak]

I have one more question to ask of you regarding the rights situation and our lockups...

We have ~30 users, who all were assigned new logins and rights to new shares...

if they were give full access to a folder called folder (\\apps\folder) and access deny at the top level (\\apps) and have one shared network mapping to the foxprog and one shared folder which contained the apps folder is there a possibility that while the appication is launched and another user with the same mappings and security, also with the application open attempts to access the shared folder containing the app folder and is denied access that he will loose his connection to the other share as well and cause the application to lock for him as well as all other users and causing corruption to the db... Almost like the connection was severed ...

 

[DSummZZZ]

If you aren't already, you should try to access all of the shares before allowing any updates, and perform error checking so you can shut down safely if they aren't. In other words, see that all of the tables can be opened in the beginning, rather than opening them on an as-needed basis.
Even if you don't need them right away, if you wait to try and open one farther along in program execution and it can't, and there is already a table open, it could get corrupted. Opening them all in the beginning would ensure that if one failed to open, there wouldn't be any updating going on and the chances of corruption at that point are quite avoided.


-Dave S.-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm