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2.4.5 The essence of this section about network usage is:

  1. You can savely share a message base among multiple computers in a Lan Manager (OS/2 Peer, Windows Network, SMB Network, ...) network as long as no Linux or Unix computer is involved.
  2. You can place the message base on a Linux/Unix fileserver running samba only as long as no fidonet software is running on the file server, no Linux or Unix client is involved, and all other clients take care that only one Fidonet program at a time is being run. (This includes not only the tosser and maintenance programs, but also the mail editor itself).
  3. There currently is not any way to savely share a Squish, JAM or Hudson message base between computers if any of the computers is a Linux or Unix machine. If you want to run Fido on the Linux box, the Linux box has to have its own messagebase (usually meaning that you must install it as sysop point or similar).

If you do not obey to these three rules, you sooner or later will experiences loss or corruption of mails and mail areas. Sorry to say so.

But what if you absolutely have to share a message base between multiple Linux/Unix or Linux/Unix and Non-Unix computers? There is only one solution to this problem: Use a message base format that does not require access synchronisation. While the Squish, JAM and Hudson message base formats to require access synchronisation because they store multiple mails in a single file, the Fido *.MSG (also known as Opus) message base format does not have this restriction because each mail is stored in a separate file. So Fido *.MSG presently is the only way to go if you want to share your message base between Linux/Unix and Non-Unix or other Unix computers.


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