On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Muhlestein, Mark wrote:

On NT an application on the server side has to open a named pipe in order for it to be used. With NT there is no way for two different clients to 'open' a named pipe on a third box like you can with a UNIX named pipe special device.

I have never said this. That is what you implied. I said that you place the named pipe on the NFS filesystem and then if you access it through the same mount on the same machine it will take data from one process to another. I said that that was all that would happen as far as I knew. As for NT I said that I would not know where to begin to open a named pipe. However, if NTFS (CIFS/SMB really) supports writing named pipes it should work whether the CIFS volume is on a real NT server or a real (tic) Network Appliance.

The named pipe is actually created by the server app and does not have an independent existence.

If it doesn't have an existence aside from the server app then what is the point of putting it on a filesystem. Filesystems are usually designed to hold persistent data.

For some background on NT named pipes see

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q101/1/50.asp http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q126/7/66.asp

I read the first one, and now understand your skew. What you should have really said is that the named pipes will not be stored on the CIFS filesystem and thus the question is irrelevant. The server running the database will create the named pipe as a resource separate from the filesystem storing the database. If the database clients connecting to the server require that the named pipe and the database file reside on the same host (I don't see why the clients should look at the file at all, but some old decripid databases have no concept of server only cooperating clients) then this will not work. However, I venture to say that this is not the case and in theory if you (the original poster) can keep the database file on another NT server you should be able to keep that file on the NetApp as well with no problems. Bear in mind that, as our colleague Mark said, the NetApp is not a database server and will not act as one. You should trreat a NetApp as a very intelligent disk, that is all that it is, a file server.

There are better ones than these, but while I was looking for them Microsoft's web site went down...

If you find them please jot me a note, I'm curious about this stuff. BTW, with NT there is a way to open a named pipe between 2 processes on 2 different boxes, with UNIX it must be on the same system and mount point AFAICT.

Tom