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NOVELL NETWORKS


New Deal software and Novell Netware

New Deal software is network aware and has been thoroughly tested for compatibility with Novell Netware 2.x, 3.x and 4.x. Unless you have purchaed the network version, you must have your New Deal software installed on the hard drive of the machine where you want to run it. You should then be able to access shared drives and printers across the network.

A network version of New Deal Office, designed to run from a network server, is available. Please contact New Deal sales for information about the network version.

SHELL.CFG

You must create a SHELL.CFG file in yourC: drive's root directory with the single line
file handles = 100
in the file.

To create the file, type the following at the DOS prompt:

echo file handles = 100 > shell.cfg
then press the Enter key.

Printing

If you are able to print to a shared network printer from DOS or with any other software, you should be able to print to it from your New Deal software. To test printing, open Preferences, Printer. Make sure you've got the correct printer and port listed in the "Printers installed" box. Point and click on the printer you want to test, and then click the Test button.

New Deal software should print a printer test page, with approximately half-inch high letters clearly written across the page. If it does not print anything, close the Printer section of Preferences and open the computer section. If you are printing over a redirected parallel (LPT) port, change the interface setting on that port to DOS. If the DOS setting does not work, try the BIOS setting.

If printing still does not work correctly on your network printer, but you are able to print to it from other programs, the problem may be a general printer problem and may not have to do with the Novell network at all. See support document 214 for general printing help.

If printouts show stray characters

If your printouts are on laser printers and show stray characters, you need to use Netware's PRINTCON to modify the Print Job Configuration. Change the File Contents option to Byte Stream (rather than text) to solve the problem.

File Sharing on the Network

New Deal software does not currently allow multiple users to access the same document file, unless that file is set to Read Only. (You can set a file to Read Only in NewManager. Click once on the file's icon, open the File menu and select Attributes.) If a user has a New Deal document open that's not Read Only, then that document file will appear in NewManager as a non-New Deal document with a standard DOS "8.3" filename and a standard DOS icon to other users on the network.

With New Deal, you can use extended attributes to set a document to "Public" access. This will enable multiple users to open the document, but not save modifications to the same file name. To open the document for editing, you select the For Editing button in the Open File dialog box. In most cases, Public is a better choice for file sharing than Read Only. See your New Deal manual for more information about file attributes.

Missing Command Interpreter, Unable to locate COMMAND.COM

If you see an error message saying something like "Bad or missing command interpreter," or "Unable to locate COMMAND.COM" when you exit your New Deal software, there is an error in the Netware login script.

In the login script, there are lines like this:

MAP F:=DRIVE:DIR1\DIR2
which make a directory or subdirectory on the server (in this case \DIR1\DIR2) appear as a separate hard drive (in this case F:) on your workstation. The problem with this usage is that the user can back out of the selected directory (by typing CD.. at the DOS prompt, for example) all the way to the root directory of the server drive.

New Deal automatically looks for the root directory of every drive it finds. Therefore, if your system is counting on finding COMMAND.COM, the DOS file interpreter, in a particular network directory when you exit New Deal, it won't. It will instead be looking at the root directory of that drive.

The solution is to use the ROOT option when setting up drives in your login script. The ROOT option prevents users from backing out of the mapped directory. (The ROOT option should probably be used all the time anyway, to prevent users from accessing the root directory). The equivalent command to the above, using ROOT, would be as follows:

MAP ROOT F:=DRIVE:DIR1\DIR2
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