Why Intuit should have an Open Source version of QuickBooks...

[Dan Jenkins]

Benjamin Scott wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, at 9:50pm, dan at rastech.com wrote:
> 
>> Even then, I was able to run QuickBooks multiuser without any 
>> problems on a Samba 2.0.x platform.
> 
> How often did you run a consistency check on your company file? One 
> of the really <SARCASM>wonderful</SARCASM> things about QuickBooks is
> that when it starts eating data, it doesn't always give you an error
> message.  It just produces the wrong answers.

Every month while we were beta testing for QuickBooks. It said we needed
to rebuild a few times, but never saw any difference before or after a
rebuild.

Now - once a year. Again, we have never lost any data, nor seen any
inconsistent numbers, either for us or the half-dozen or so clients
(and us) who use it, since 1996. YMMV.

> As long as you keep oplocks turned off, we find QuickBooks works as 
> well with Samba as with Windows.  Not that that's saying much.  Turn 
> them on, and you're virtually guaranteed to have trouble.

I'd heard this a number of times. For us, it has not been a problem. I
did try it both with & without oplocks and saw a significant performance
hit with oplocks off and auditting was on, but otherwise no difference
in behavior.

> QuickBooks isn't the only program which reacts badly to oplocks. 
> Microsoft Access tends to have the same problem (with multi-user 
> access). I image other things, too.  I always configure a separate 
> share for anything that even smells like a database, and disable 
> oplocks (and enable strict sync and strict locking) on that share.

I've had major problems with oplocks with several applications, Access 
or programs built from Access, being the worst. Some problems with DOS 
FoxPro applications too. So, I do recommend the oplock-less share 
approach for offending applications. I have also done with same with the 
Windows Server shares, but, if I recollect right, you can not disable 
oplocks on a share-by-share basis with Windows, but you can with Samba - 
which is one reason why I consider Samba a superior Windows file server.

-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support for over a Quarter Century