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Old 07-20-2013, 07:10 PM   #1
erwin1234
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Posts: 23
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Sony PRS-T1
Question Calibre Network Request

Good to know you are working on a true multi user support. That is a big step! I would already be happy with a much smaller step.

My family really love calibre. Whith all those devices in the house, PC's, laptops, tablets, smartphones, ereaders and what more I decided to store all our ebook data on our main W7 server computer. And let all family members help with maintaining the database, store their books, sync their devices. And have an automated backup each night for safety.

But bummer... calibre does not work that well in this scenario. Even if you mount the library via a network drive letter between two Windows 7 computers running the NTFS filesystems it seems calibre has problems and will give you strange windows errors (no access, cannot write..). Note this is not a true multi user configuration - it is not working for a single user using a mapped network drive! I have never seen problems like this with other software. Should file operations like open/read/write/rename not be just transparant over the local network? Are there bugs or limitations in the code?

Users requested this scenario to work since 2010/2011. Before doing the full fledged multiuser implementation, would it be possible to first fix the one user/multiple computers/networked database scenario? I did not look at the code yet, but how much work do you think would this take?

I know file locking over network drives can be tedious. But you could use other mechanisms like creating temp .lock files to make sure there is only one instance running. Like e.g. the sync program freefilesyn does. Or forget about the lock at all and let the user decide how to run it. Just make sure the open/read/write/rename works on a network drive.

What do you think?

Oh and ofcourse thanks for this excellent software !
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