apologies for unknowingly rekindling old flame war!

[smith at mcclb0.med.nyu.edu]

In article <1993May11.052759.29180 at nic.funet.fi>, harper at convex.csc.FI (Rob Harper) writes:
> 
>>However, the big problem, as Bill points out above, is
>>networking!  Should every individual who wants to run Entrez be forced 
>>to buy a CD reader?  
> 
> 	No! It is quite simple to give lots of people access to a
> 	CD reader.
> 
Yes. In principal it is easy.  But you can run into problems.  We tried to do 
this using our DECstation. However, DEC's (*&^%^$#) CD driver serves the 
files up with UPPERCASE names.  The VAX now reads these names (with Multinet) 
as having a '$' in front. Entrez does not like that.  Then Pathworks will not 
allow a PC to see a file with UNIX 'x' protection.  So all your Entrez 
directories appear empty.  We never succeeded in serving up the CDs to all 
our machines.  We could only do it after copying the files over to the the 
DECstation's hard disk where we could get the filenames right adn the 
protections correct (both from a UNIX and AppleShare standpoints) and finally 
all the files had to be typed correctly so that Mac Entrez would read them. 
Then we had Entrez available via NFS to the other UNIX machines and the VAX, 
to Macs via CAP and to PCs via Pathworks.  But it was not straightforward and 
it took a lot of time to get running.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Ross Smith,  Research Computing Resource, Department of Cell Biology, NYU-MC|
|E-Mail:  SMITH at NYUMED.BITNET (BITNET),   SMITH at MCCLB0.MED.NYU.EDU (Internet)|
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