urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de (Matthias Urlichs) (08/13/89)
Some people are terminally curious... Take me, for instance. I wanted to know how hard it could possibly be to write an AppleShare file server which runs as yet another application under MultiFinder (and/or from an INIT). So I just did it. Turned out to take about two months (well, if I had worked fulltime on it, it would have...), including rebooting my Mac (w/ lots of INITs) ten times a day. Now the first version is almost finished (my Mac now bombs only two times a day), and as soon as I figure out some remaining glitches, it's going to be beta-testable. As soon as the server is _really_ finished, it is probably going to be shareware, with a limited version distributed freely (you get th efull version if you pay), or something like that. I'm not too sure about this myself (yet). So who wants to do some extensive testing? Please keep in mind that beta-testing something like this is bound to recreate some of the more interesting system errors. I am also not interested in whether it will run concurrently with MS Word (I already know it does) or MPW (it does not, at least not reliably) but I want to find out _why_ the server hangs MPW. So you should probably know what AFP is about and what the "SC" command of MacsBug does. The program itself currently does not do any directory level access control (waiting for the B-tree Manager), or file-level record locking (waiting for Apple to put this into the file system), or any Desktop management (the Desktop Manager does it for me, so you'll need it too). So you won't be able to run FoxBase in multiuser mode on it. Not yet. A nice name for this server is also something I'm looking for.