Network Contention

At a site running Advanced Netware, a user recently tried to rebuild several indexes at once. The system refused to allow this and while one machine happily indexed away the other displayed a "Waiting for Index Transaction Lock" message. In an effort to break this stalemate the user rebooted the machine successfully indexing. (I'm saying nothing!). All subsequent attempts to log in were successful but when any workstation was left alone long enough to begin background indexing, the workstation crahed to DOS with "RTP57A Line 168 String Space Format Error". Subsequent investigation tracked the problem to a file which was relationally indexed, and in the !file there was a record with a non standard key ("CUST.HEROD*SIBLINGS*BOT*) and a record structure as follows

        001  0
        002  807818
        003
        004  100008
        005  807800
        006
        007  100008
        008  807834
        009
        etc

This was obviously a redundancy caused by the reboot. Deleting this record fixed the problem and I record it here in case you ever come across the situation yourselves.

(Volume 1, Issue 10, Pages 9,10)