Answering msg from David Nugent to Rowan Crowe,
on Saturday May 27 1995 at 19:14

 rc>>> NetWare supports full file locking, to the same
 rc>>> extent as SHARE, as far as I know.

 DN>> Well, sort of, but 'no'.

 rc>> Sure about that?

 DN> Yes.

    This is getting confusing. Exactly *what* are you sure of? :)

 DN>> file locking is not explicitly supported by the NetWare shell.
 DN>> You can,however, load a small TSR called INT2F.COM and install
 DN>> support - that translates share calls to IPX locking calls.

 rc>> It's supported by the shell we use.

 DN> Explicit support must have been linked in. This isn't, however, the
 DN> default. ..or wasn't, at least, with Novell 3.12 and earlier.

    We run Novell Netware 3.11 100 user site license. I've seen several
others schools running similar setups who also run Ezycom (and other
software which uses file locking).

 rc>> Ezychat, written in a mix of QuickBASIC and ASM.
 rc>> (Please don't lynch me. :) ). At initialisation, I
 rc>> check for generic SHARE capability by creating a temp
 rc>> file (in denynone mode), and attempting to lock it. If
 rc>> that fails, then Ezychat refuses to continue.

 DN> How do you check?

    How do I check for share capability, or do you mean how do I know that
the low level stuff isn't using Netware calls?

    I check for share capabilty by locking a file region and seeing if it succeeds.

    As for the low level stuff, QuickBASIC uses INT 21h/AX=5C01h, the
standard FLOCK SHARE call. No sign of INT 2Fh anywhere.

 DN> BTW, the "is share installed" check via INT 2Fh will succeed on

    As I said above, I do a generic check, by actualling USING it to lock a
file, rather than relying on an installation check. :)

    Perhaps you should check your references ?

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