I think it safe to say that AREV NT clients run far slower on Netware than DOS clients. Our customer with around 400 DOS users on Netware want to roll out NT workstations gradually replacing all the old DOS and Win311 machines. I am given to understand that AREV DOS clients won?t work with an NT server.

I think the ultimate solution is to migrate from Netware to NT. The problem is how to keep the DOS clients running while giving maximum performance for NT clients.

I?ve thought of a possible solution but I don?t know if it would work.

1. Keep the Netware server for the DOS & Win311 clients.

2. Install an NT server with the AREV service.

3. Map a drive on NT pointing to the AREV directory on Netware.

4. Connect NT clients to AREV via the NT server.

The question is would linear hashing be compromised by running it on Netware and NT?

I would be grateful for any ideas.

Dave Harrison ? ICS Sales UK

Here's how I'd do it:

1. Use the NPP driver in AREV (even though it's slower than the Netware driver). This might not be strictly necessary but it would probably help alleviate some of the troublesome aspects of the NT client.

2. Use dreaded protocol stacking which would access the Novell server via IPX/SPX and the NT server via NETBUI or TCP-IP.

3. Make sure that the NT clients have sufficient file handles in the CONFIG.NT file (100 or so).

4. Be prepared to take some flak over performance issues. You may also encounter lock-latency timing problems if you do a lot of heavy-duty transaction processing which uses a significant number of locks.

5. Route all printing through the Netware server, if possible. Otherwise you'll have startup configuration issues that will be complex, to say the least.

Don Miller

C3 Inc.

I have had to do a similar migration about 2 year ago, so I understand your position.

First, it is possible to use an AREV/DOS client with NT Server, if you are prepared for the usual DOS memory juggle. But I feel that this might not be the simplest or the best solution.

I assume that with 400 users you will be using the Revelation NLM or the NT service as appropriate. If not you are crazy!!

What is important to the client? Is it upgrading the clients from DOS to NT? Or is it migrating (downgrading ) from Netware to NT server?

If the client wants to do both, this is hard. Your proposed solution would work for normal file and print shareing applications, and is in fact the microsoft reccomended process. However AREV works differently. It is not possible (as far as I know) to use both the NPP client and the NLM client simultaneously on any client.

If you wish to upgrade the clients to NT and keep the Netware server, this is possible, and will probably produce the highest performance.

If you would like to post more details of the project objectives, perhaps I can be more specific.

Hi

Thanks for your response. The original plan was to upgrade the Novell 3.12 server (an old 486) and to add the NLM. This would run with existing DOS and Win 3.11 clients. This was successfully done about 6 months ago and vast speed improvements were noted. The customer then wanted to start replacing the DOS and 3.11 clients with NT over the next couple of years. When we tried a couple out, the speed degradation was BAD. We have done all sorts of testing on different configurations and the best speed we can come up with on an NT client is unacceptable to the customer.

The customer wants a workable solution; doesn't really mind what it is so I guess the simplest would be to stick with Novell if that's possible. We have tried running ARev 3.12 (instead of our 2.12 app) which did give some speed improvement but not enough. We have tried tuning the idle time control in the PIF but this decreases the cpu usage so that other apps get a look-in but ARev's performance is even worse. So we began to look at changing them to an NT server, where we would be looking to run the NT Service. Our tests lead us to believe that NT clients under this setup would run about 50% slower than DOS clients which would just about be acceptable. However, we then ran into the issue of running DOS clients on the NT server, which is where you came in.

Hope this clarifies the issue and any further help you can offer would be much appreciated.

Thanks

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