Answering msg from David Nugent to Rowan Crowe,
on Tuesday May 23 1995 at 17:45

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

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

    Sure about that?

 DN> IPX file locking is different (with a different protocol) to share
 DN> locking. *FILE OPEN MODES* (share deny all, none, write or read) are
 DN> supported by Netware and are compatible with DOS, but SHARE (INT 2Fh)
 DN> file locking is not explicitly supported by the NetWare shell. You
 DN> can,however, load a small TSR called INT2F.COM and install support -
 DN> that translates share calls to IPX locking calls.

    It's supported by the shell we use.

 rc>> I run a BBS over a Novell 100 user network. None
 rc>> of the nodes have or need SHARE loaded. File locks do
 rc>> occur occasionally, and are handled appropriately. :)

 DN> If the code is SHARE comaptible, are you *certain* that they work, or
 DN> is some external semaphore code actually doing the work?

    It is using 'normal' sharing methods. Some examples:

    Ezycom, which is written in Pascal. The occasional file lock occurs
when using the internal multiline chat, as each line typed gets saved to
MESSNODE.nnn where the nnn is the node number of the other nodes in that
channel. Each participant's MESSNODE.nnn is kept open constantly, and
locked/unlocked as necessary.

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

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