[cvsnt] Lockserver Issue

[Tony Hoyle]

Peter Crowther wrote:
>> From: Arthur Barrett
>> Download a copy of the latest CVSNT server and install on the
>> server (I
>> am assuming here that Netware is sufficiently similar to Windows or
>> linux that that will work)
> 
> It's not.  Netware servers are very, very odd beasts; they were designed from the ground up as file and authentication servers, *not* application servers.  Certainly up to Netware 4, for example, there was no memory protection and no real notion of processes - you could load modules into the server's memory space, but that was about as far as it went.
> 
Even if you use local mode you must have a lockserver.. local mode is 
fine for testing where you have a single machine (in fact it'll run a 
lockserver automatically in that case) but for multiple developers there 
absolutely must be one on the network accessible to all developers, and 
this must be configured in the repository.

There are two big issues with trying to run repositories on network 
shares like that - the first one is integrity.. you're not using a 
single process to arbitrate the access to the files but multiple 
processes are accessing at once, and even with a lockserver controlling 
it nobody is going to guarantee it's safe (file locks are definately 
*not* safe over network shares as caching and non-atomic actions can 
play havoc).  The second is network bandwidth - you're pretty much 
talking about every client sending the entire repository to itself 
(which may be hundreds of megabytes) and processing it for every 
update... that's gotta hurt when more than one or two people are doing it.

Novell have moved to Linux now so one option is simply upgrade and run 
that version with the linux cvsnt - 
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/10/10/netware-linux

Tony