Bill Antonia Beacon Community College Home e-mail bill@beaconhillcott.freeserve.co.uk Work e-mail at@beacon.e-sussex.sch.uk I've been playing about with SIMS using SuSE 6.4 as a server through Samba. The experiment was to create multiple instances of SIMS but without having to copy the lot for every machine, and I did not want to put a copy on each workstation. This is for training purposes by the way, Assessment Manager on Wednesday. Copy a full version of SIMS onto the Linux server. Create however many instances of SIMS directories you require. I needed 16, one for each workstation. At this point there is nothing in them. In each directory being used for each instance Create links to all the files in the main sims directory. Copy the SYSTEM directory. Copy any other directory which may be required, eg Assessment Manager: MARKS and STAR. Star: STAR. Equipment Register: EQUIP, STAR and possibly ACCOUNTS. etc Configure Samba to share each instance and connect each workstation to a different share. To the person on the workstation, it appears that they have full control and do not get a message saying someone else is using the file...., try again later. In Samba, each share being used in this way needs the option: wide links = yes This allows Samba to follow the links outside of the directory being shared. For 16 machines to use Assessment Manager and the original copy of SIMS, takes up 2.1GB of hard drive space. We have 1800 pupils and as far as I can tell, never archived the pupil data. We still have Star data going back to 93. So it could be less depending upon your school. If each workstation has the same LANID, then to update the system, alter the main copy for that LANID then copy the SYSTEM directory to all your instances, overwriting the old data. I did try to get away with using links to some of the directories as well, but found it difficult in separating the different instances. I'm finding links wonderful things, try to do that on NT4! By the way, the flags for smbmount have changed again! I now have 3 different versions on different machines. In SuSE 6.1 smbmount "\\\\servername\\share" -c 'mount /mountpoint' -U user%password SuSE 6.3 smbmount \\servername\share /mountpoint -U user%password SuSE 6.4 smbmount \\servername\share /mountpoint username=user%password When are they going to stop fiddling with it. Yes add functions and ease of use but keep it reasonably backward compatible. I suppose I'd better get on with my tutor reports, a bit of procrastination going on here. 29 still to go. Regards Bill