Hi,

I am confronted with a medical application that uses the bdegine and a paradox alias to a database on a W2K Pro workstation in a separate workgroup. The clients that connect to this database have the correct setting to this database in their bde-config but cannot connect to this database UNLESS either of two solutions is applied.
1) on the W2K PC (where the database resides) the cdrom station is shared. If the client maps a drive to this share (cdrom) the application works, even if the cdromstation is empty. In fact we really don't want shares open on that PC.
2) make the W2K Pro PC with the database part of the company NT-domain.

Neither solution is in fact an acceptable solution. We do not want users mapping to shares on that PC outside the company domain and we do not want this PC in our company domain. The PC has an ipadddress that is in the range of the client-PC's.

Can someone explain what the reason is that the clients cannot connect normally? Is their a permanent smb connection needed perhaps ? And is there another solution possible ?

The dabaselocation in the bde-alias is defined as such :
\\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\c$\program files\.....\data
the rest is default in that alias.

I really hope someone can explain this to me, as the medical company that provides the database does not know right away how to solve this.

I remember having problems when using this kind of setup.

I remember solving them by having all the stations pointing theyr NET dir (the BDE NET dir) on the mapped drive, which has to be exactly the same drive (say N and has to contain a dir which in turn would contain the NET file.

Also keep much more short the DATA alias path, and remember NOT to use UNC names, but ALWAYS mapped drives; the BDE is known to have all sorts of strange problems with UNC names.

The net dir is where paradox keeps record locking information. This prevents users from attempting to update the same field of the same record simultaneously. For this reason all users must point to the same netdir. It does not have to be mapped to the same drive letter. In fact it does not have to be mapped at all. UNC will work.

If any user accesses the database and has a different net dir file the database will not allow other users with different net dirs to access the database. They have to find the "Pdoxusrs.net" file that the person opening the database first is using.

You don't have to have that PC on your network you only need to have the net dir for all the users on your network.

Go to BDE and on Configuration tab go to :
configuration drivers native paradox and set the netdir director to a location on your network that all of the clients can access. Then make sure that all the clients point to this same place. The company probably set up a default place simply because it didn't know where you would want the net dir to be.