The LH file corruption we have all experienced with NetWare is unfortunately still with us. This type of LH file corruption occurs despite using the LH NLM.

The problem is the result of the corrupted NetWare 'turbo FAT' which is a special FAT index used when a file exceeds 64 blocks (and the corresponding number of FAT entries). NetWare creates this index to group together all FAT entries for that file.

Large files created by 'random access' databases manifest this problem (this was first noticed in Betrieve). The only way to eliminate the problem is to disable creation of the turbo FAT. In past versions of NetWare, Novell has made a patch/utility available to do this and now there is a version for NetWare 5. It can be found at ftp://ftp.novell.com/pub/netwire/nsd/nw5turbo.exe.

Please note that I have just been notified about this patch and have not yet installed it on a production server although I expect it to perform as the readme states and as it did under NetWare 4x- simply disabling the turbo FAT. Load this as you did under NetWare 4 as the last line in your STARTUP.NCF (after the disk devices are mounted). Note that you will likely need to re-added this to the STARTUP.NCF if it is removed by installation of future NetWare file server service packs/patches.

Thanks for the heads-up, Chris.

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