[ale] Two offices, one data pool

[John Pilman]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Ron Frazier <atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com
> wrote:

>  Hi Michael T.,
>
> This may be a stupid question, but, if you establish a VPN, couldn't the
> remote office directly access the same database as the home base, with all
> the normal locking mechanisms, etc.  I dealt with a situation like that once
> while working with Delta Air Lines.  We had a remote office with a (very
> slow) leased line and network bridges (more accurately gateways) at each end
> of the connection.  The remote site connected directly to a Clipper database
> just as though they were sitting at headquarters.  All the locking stuff
> worked fine.  They could also access shared word processing documents, etc.
> just like they were at headquarters.  I had to spend a whole day once
> tweaking the gateway not to forward superfluous traffic to the remote site
> because performance was abysmal.  Also, I had to store a local copy of my
> Clipper database app and load it from the local hard drive at the remote
> site rather than retrieving it over the leased line when someone started
> it.  I did similar things with the executables for common office
> applications.  So, the remote site started up executables locally, but
> accessed data files from the file share at headquarters.  It never did work
> great, but it was acceptable.  With a VPN, I was thinking you could do
> something similar, as the VPN would act like a bridge.  That would eliminate
> your concurrency problems.  Maybe something like Himachi might work.  Just a
> thought.
>
> Ron
>
>
We do something similar with our timesheets data.  The program can be loaded
on the satellite machine, but the data resides on a server in the office.
The performance of this arrangement is really bad, so most of us VPN in and
then start a Remote Desktop session on timesheets server.   That's much
faster for us.  I'm the only one using Linux, so thankfully OpenVPN and
rdesktop are working fine.  Actually, there's not a Linux version of the
program, so this is a double good method for me.

...John
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