Chapter 7: Fileshare on UNIX

This chapter describes Fileshare on UNIX.

7.1 Running Fileshare as a Background Process

The Fileshare Server uses the Enhanced Accept/Display syntax (Adis module) for its screen displays and keyboard handling. Consequently, the Fileshare Server uses much more processor time if you start it as a background UNIX process. To avoid this overhead, you should configure the Fileshare Server using the -b option. This disables all Fileshare displays and keyboard reading.

Since Fileshare does not read the keyboard in background mode, you cannot close it down in the normal manner using the Esc key sequence.

Warning: Do not kill the Fileshare process because this results in the corruption of any data files which are open.

Instead, write a program which calls Fileshare Manager. Alternatively, you can run the supplied utility fsclose as follows:

cobrun fsclose

The fsclose utility calls Fileshare Manager itself and prompts you for the name of the Fileshare Server you want to close down and the CCI protocol.

Because you can only shut down the Fileshare Server remotely, the Fileshare Server must have been configured to use a password file. See the section Password File Maintenance in the chapter Security for details.

The Fileshare Server does not start in background mode unless you start it with a password file.

In background mode, any messages the Fileshare Server would normally display on the screen are written to the file fsscreen.lst in the Fileshare Server's current directory.

An example configuration file follows. This configuration file specifies that the:

Fileshare Server name is server-1
Password file is password.fil
Communications protocol to use is CCITCP
-b option invokes running in background mode

-s server-1
-pf password.fil
-b
-cm ccitcp

You can now start the Fileshare Server in background mode by entering:

fs > server-1.log 2>&1 &

On some UNIX systems, output can be sent to the terminal after it has been disconnected. When this happens the entire session terminates. Consequently, you need to redirect the output from the command.

7.2 The NFILES Setting

On UNIX systems, the NFILES setting defines how many separate file descriptors can be used in the File Handler config file. This can be set for individual accounts and for the system as a whole. You must ensure that the number of separate file descriptors is set sufficiently high for Fileshare which uses them as follows:

One file descriptor is used for every file opened on disk. So, two file descriptors are used for each indexed file opened. Note that two users sharing the same file only require the file to be opened once on disk.
CCITCP uses one file descriptor for every connected Fileshare client
CCITCP uses one file descriptor for every outstanding Fileshare request (normally this is a maximum of two)

For the user account that the Fileshare session uses, NFILES must be set to accommodate the maximum number of open files and the maximum number of Fileshare clients. In addition, the system setting of NFILES may need to be increased.