Semiversal Driver
Published 19 AUG 2010 at 04:04:00PM by Captain C
It has come to our attention recently about a misconception regarding the lore of the Universal Driver. It has been commonly accepted by all (including us here at Sprezz Towers) that on small networks (2-4 users), using one of the Universal Drivers without an NT Service is the preferred network configuration.
However, after a lengthy debugging session involving OpenInsight 9.1.1 and the UD 4.6, Revelation US has verified that without a Linear Hash Server product, you must use the All Networks Driver.
To quote Revelation:
Yes, out of the box the UD clients are included but that is to ease the installation. You still need a proper server setup for shared access.
You are right, but the “Universal Driver” refers to the combination of the Linear Hash Service and the Client Driver. Together the service and client drivers are the “Universal Driver” package. Using only the client driver without the service is only half the setup.
…
No, the “All Networks” driver was a unique code base and worked on a completely different principle than the Universal Driver. To think of the UD as an all networks driver is not accurate.
OpenInsight 9.x includes the Universal Driver (LinearHash service and client driver) for , as I believe, the reason of making the setup of a proper stable multi-user setup easier. This is especially true for small 5 user networks that couldn’t justify the cost of the LinearHash service.
With the Universal Driver NUL (Network User License) free for all OpenInsight 9.x customers, we urge all pure OpenInsight shops not using a Linear Hash service to install the Universal Driver 4.6 NUL on your servers.
Those customer that choose not to upgrade to 9.x and are not using a Linear Hash Service product should switch drivers to the All Networks as soon as possible. Remember, switching back to the All Networks driver could cause you problems if any of your tables have been created with the new UD style header.
To help with this, Sprezzatura has enhanced our Revert LH Utility. This takes a linear hash table with the new UD 3 style header and converts it to standard LH format, readable by all network drivers.
Since the last release a few years back, we've fixed a few small bugs involving keys traversing frame boundaries. We've also added a new user interface window to help you with reverting your files back to the original header structure.
Our new user interface allows you to see the Revelation file names of the files you wish to revert. It also allows you to pick and choose files, if, for some reason, you'd like to keep the new header on some files.
This is a free of charge utility, and can be obtained by contacting us here.
Please note: The free version of the UD 4.6 does not work with any version of OpenInsight prior to version 9. It also does not work with Advanced Revelation.
(This post brought to you by the letter A(aron))
Comments
Comment by Barry Stevens on 20 AUG 2010 at 08:23:55AM:
What are the symptoms of using Universal Driver with 9.1.1 on a small network with no 'server'
Comment by apk on 20 AUG 2010 at 11:13:02AM:
In the instance we used to diagnose this problem, it manifested itself as an error in FORMDES when trying to save a large window.
This implies that the symptoms would be random crashes in an exe or dll. Running
''%%WinDbg%%'' from Microsoft helped us diagnose the actual error location (instead of FormDes) and the good folks at RevUS helped with the rest.
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