[AccessD] have some fun

Hi all

Well, Susan is such a nice lady that I cannot accept to be given all the credits. It is for a reason that we both are listed as authors.

But the credit goes to Susan for the subject of this thread! It is more fun than I had expected - I had nearly forgotten those Macaholics and those haunted by accessfobia.

As you all know, to write such 10 statements in limited space, some corners have to be cut. But the remarks on the noisy Macs are based on experience. We have several advertising agencies and TV/film production companies among our clients all of them running an Access based time/billing/ERP application, and the list of "issues" we have seen is endless. Main problem is that Mac tech people (not users, they don't know anything) believe they understand networking. As a general rule and warning (exceptions exist of course) they don't. Worse, when (not if) something misbehaves regarding the network, they blame _everything else_ connected to the network for being the source of trouble.
Recently at a client we saw a corrupted backend once a week. Normally it was perhaps once a year. Nothing at our end was changed so the cause had to be something else. The network was one of those that had been expanded in 57 steps; it was close to impossible to track down why things were set up as they were. Local switches were all over and users in one end printed to a big RIP and printer across the network. So we cut through all this, isolated the pc users on a separate LAN with just an uplink to the mothership network to gain Internet access. From day one: No corruption.
Now the client moved. A brand new network was installed and guess what: Corruption again. We found out that the network was not configured as to our recommendations, and again to cut short, we isolated the pc users and their server and printer on their own switch and trouble went away.

The reason for the trouble with the Macs is not the Macs by themselves but how the users punish these machines. Typically they run 24 hours all week long loaded with all kind of applications that download all sorts of data. Users run heavy application that saves and copy multi gigabyte files between workstations, servers, RIPs, local FTP servers etc. etc. Our favourite is when they attach 100 MB files to e-mails wondering why this brings their Exchange to a crawl. "The mail is down!" they claim when the e-mail client times out, but the answer is "Wait and see."

It is possible to make Macs and their users to coexist with pc users and Access but it requires a top-notch network which Mac people typically neither do or will understand not to say allocate the money for. It is more fun to spend money on a 30" flat screen or a new stack of RAID disks for a NAS to store even more videos.

/gustav

>>> ssharkins at gmail.com 09-04-2008 19:29 >>>
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=331 

======Gustav wrote an article on Access corruption for TR -- it's making a 
few people pull hairs and trade insults. After reading the article, be sure 
to check out the comments -- some of these folks really have too much time 
on their hands. :)

Susan H.