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Database Repair / Maintenance

We've had C&P Classic 4 installed now for about 5 weeks. Our shop has 8 Macs and 3 PCs, our server is a G4-400 running ASIP 6.2. We seemed to have to repair or service the database file almost every 3 or 4 days. I'm curious about what others typically experience regarding daily/weekly/monthly "maintenance".

Greg Weir VP Project Management Bravo Zulu Interactive

We had quite a problem like that when we keep the database on the same server as file and mail. We gave the database its own server and presto! No more corruptions.

Ross Gaspar DKO New York

AppleShare 6.2 address some of these problems. I suggest upgrading to ASIP 6.3, although you will need to go to OS9 on that server before doing so.

Also, on the Windows PCs, highlight the main icon (My Computer, whatever) , right button click and go to properties. Under Performance go to Troubleshooting and make sure "Disable write-behind caching on all drives" is checked.

Hope this helps

Matthew Hegge Studio One, Inc.

We currently use C&P Pro 4.01. We also run in a cross-platform environment with 30 Macs and 10 PCs. We use an NT server, but experienced the same type of difficulties you were experiencing when we first started using C&P. After about 4 months, things went much smoother with repairs/maintenance on the database about every 2 weeks. We now have repairs on the database 1-2 times per quarter.

We found that the key to eliminating errors was training. We brought out a trainer 2 times to train and retrain the staff to correctly enter information and tab through every field. Once our employees were comfortable using the software, our problems decreased significantly.

Hope this helps.

Alice Mathews The Tombras Group

Greg,

I switched to C&P Pro Ver. 4.01 on May 1, 2000. Haven't experienced any problem yet. We have PCs as well as MACs in our shop but so far I have allowed only PC access to C&P. Our server runs on NT.

Johnson Paul Accounting and Systems Manager Campbell Michener & Lee Incorporated

Greg:

We had similar problems with our system at first. The culprits are almost always the PCs. Because you are running ASIP 6.2, I assume you are running at least OS 8.6. Running OS 8.5 and ASIP 6 created a large number of corruption problems for us, but I think your server setup is OK. I don't know about OS9 though, we're not running it on the server. Anyway, download the C&P Database Guide from their site. The two big things about the PCs are: (Win9.x)

1. Make sure you enable _verify_ in your autoexec.bat file; and

2. Disable _write-behind_ caching.

All the instructions are included in the Database Guide. -- http://www.cnp-x.com/support/database_guide.html -- Once we did this, the database corruption problem was gone.

Shawn Magee Manager, Production and Technology Tap Communications Inc.

Dear Greg,

We have Classic 4 in an all Mac environment with the same server you have and haven't really had any database trouble. The only thing I seem to routinely do is verify/recover job tickets. I run some of the Auditor reports pretty often just to make sure everything is matching up. I wonder if it's the cross-platform aspect that is complicating things?

I am very careful about doing daily backups, as there are some kind of strange things that happen from time to time, with data just disappearing or not posting correctly. I'm not getting any official error messages, though, so there's not really anything I can check.

Good Luck,

Catherine Colangelo The Phillips Agency

We have the same problem. We're running C&P on a blue&white G3 with MacOS8.6 and ASIP 6.2. We have about 34 Macs and 15 PCs, though not everyone uses C&P. our network is 10/100BaseT with a 256k Frame Relay connection between Chicago and New Jersey. Our sights are set on the WAN (Frame Relay) link as the probable source of our problems, but I want to take a look at the autoexec.bat configuration.

Recently, we have received several repair messages and ran the full repair utility. This didn't work, so we used the import/export utility. So far so good, but done this about four or five times in the last 2 years. We frequently have problems loosing information entered in the estimate worksheets while saving. We are checking all of our network lines to see if they are ok. Any other suggestions would be helpful.

Kim Hogen Donahoe & Purohit

Kim:

With regard to the data loss over the 256K frame, we too had loss, corruption and lock-out problems between our Saskatoon and Regina offices. The problem seemed to be with packet latency times as opposed to a speed or bandwidth issue. The system was painfully slow and very prone to corruption. Our interim solution was to run a couple of Timbuktu servers in Saskatoon to talk directly to the C&P server locally, thus all the client/server traffic was not over the frame. We got on the backs of our Telco and they cleaned up some of their wiring in our building. After a few rounds with them, the latency speeds increased by about 5 times (to 15-20ms) and two things happened. 1. The speed of C&P over the frame increased dramatically, and 2. The corruption of the db over the frame stopped.

Shawn Magee Manager, Production and Technology Tap Communications Inc.

We have about 35 Macs and 2 or 3 PC accessing C&P Pro 4.01 with only a rare glitch. The server is a Mac 7500 with a Newer 400 G3 accelerator in it, 128Mb RAM and ASIP 6.3. This server runs only ASIP, no other apps on the server. The only files on the server are the C&P files, the C&P application so I can download it easily to client machines and a couple of other files put there for secure access. Our last problem seemed to be at month end.. but was solvable without rebuilding the database.

The speed is pretty terrific, of course we also have switched 100baseT on all computers too.

Make sure C&P has it's own server, in a smaller situation a revA or revB iMac would do just fine as well, but up the memory to at least 128mb.

Kim Christiansen IT Manager Horton Lantz Marocco http://www.hlm.com

I'm using Classic 3.2, but after having troubles for some time we had our cabling tested and found some bad cables. In addition, we moved C&P to a dedicated server. Since then we've had very few problems. I also run the 3 Utilities program daily, which catches problems before they become too serious.

Jennifer Glick Director of Operations Rainier Corp

System Managers,

Keep in mind there is an excellent resource on our web site that discusses the nature of data damage, prevention, and repair. It's called the C&P Database Guide and can be downloaded from our web page dedicated to C&P System Manager's at http://www.cnp-x.com/support/sys_mgr.html

Kent Richardson E-mail User Groups Administrator

Hello, We had a recent experience with a C & P 4.03 database which a complete repair of the 214 MB database took over 100 hours to complete. We used 233mhz iMac repaired the data locally, not over the network.

I was told that allocating more RAM to the C & P player would increase speed of such an operation. But, I noticed no matter how much RAM the C & P Player was given, it would not utilize the additional RAM (?) Granted, the iMac only has 96 MB, and the OS used approx. 13 MB for system resources. I don't understand why the C & P Player won't "fill up" RAM allocated for it's use (?)

Any insight into the lengthly repair time or RAM issue, would be greatly appreciated?

BTW- The data was finally repaired and users are able to perform the functions that were previous causes of MUCH delay and instability.

Dave Braford

Hi Dave,

It doesn't normally take that long to repair a C&P database, unless there is extensive damage to repair. Allocating more memory doesn't necessarily increase speed, but can certainly prevent a memory error message if it's set too low. If you would like to repair your databases more quickly, try running on a fast NT workstation. We have found those to perform these functions the fastest.

sysop

Doing a DB repair on a Mac sucks. ESPECIALLY a 500MHz Powerbook (256MB), you'd think that would be pretty fast as I dont know if C&P supports the G4. It took over 4 HOURS (and in some repairs takes 6-8 hours!) to locally repair a 355MB DB (basically the HD in the powerbook stinks). I started experimenting at this point. I put the DB on a 7200RPM IBM IDE drive in a Firewire box....the time to repair went to 30 mins! I built a new dedicated server with some parts laying around - dual 550 P3s, UW2 SCSI, IBM 7200RPM (2MB cache) drives, 512MB, and Win2K Server. I repaired the DB remotely - ran C&P on my powerbook with DB on server...time to repair went to about 10 mins (basically using only 1 CPU as C&P is not aware of MPs and Win2k is not that good at distributing but MUCH better than NT4sp6a).....I installed C&P locally on the Win2K server...time to repair went to 4 mins! If you're gonna repair a large DB do it on the fastest HD you have.

Merlin Johnson Information Technology Director Lambesis, Inc.

I can't imagine being able to do a full DB repair in four minutes. I'd love to hear more about that. We've upgraded our server to a G4, and I'm sure it would still take hours. And our database is not that big.

Daniel Thompson Director of Operations Phinney/Bischoff Design House