Dear Geoff
After reading Bill Lamin's article 'Turbocharging the network' I thought
that we had a more refined solution so I have enclosed an article for your
perusal which may be of interest to your readers.  I think that this would
probably be of great benefit to Mr. Lamin on his network and we will send
you a copy of !NetScrap to put on the disc if you wish.  Hope this is OK and
if there is anything else I can do please get in touch.

Allan

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Network GTI     		Allan Kealey

Like Bill Lamin we have also been struggling with an Acorn Ethernet network
but have come up with a different approach to the !Scrap problem.  I did not
relish the thought of copying !Scrap into every pupils user area on our
network and toyed with several ideas.  The most outlandish involved getting
the network boot up routine to create a RAM disc on the users machine when
that machine logged onto the network.  This would have !Scrap loaded into it
which would then be moved on to the users network area.  This seemed very
complicated and not really worth the effort.  The process that is described
below works on our network and has, touch wood, never caused any problems at
all!

The Network
Our network has a main fileserver which runs Level 4, CD Net II and
!Netgain, a very much ignored but very efficient application server.  In a
similar way to Bill Lamin's network when client stations are first switched
on they log onto the network and various management issues are dealt with
i.e. !Alarms and !Configure are unplugged, a backdrop with useful programs
pinned to it is loaded, the floppy disc icon is removed from the icon bar
and the Netgain module is loaded.  This ensures that there are no viruses or
games etc to bother about!  We also run a file transfer service for pupils
who wish to bring work from home. Netgain is a read only filing system and
all the applications that the pupils used are stored in it.  The access most
of these programs through the Apps folder on the icon bar the most popular
ones are pinned to the backdrop to make the system even easier to use.  We
only have 700 users but we quickly realised that the memory overheads from
the !Scrap application alone was more than we could stand plus we also could
foresee problems if a pupil deleted this important application.  We
developed !NetScrap.

!NetScrap
We try to run a tidy network and feel that we should lead by example so we
make sure that all the applications the pupils use are organised in a
Directory tree i.e. all the Word Processors together, Design Processor in a
folder on its own etc.  Certain applications require !Scrap whilst others do
not so a copy of !NetScrap is put into each of these directories i.e. the
Printers directory contains !Printers, !EcoPrint and !NetScrap. All pupils
are encouraged to log on every time they use the network so the problem of
the scrap directory then becomes an easy one to solve.  One unexpected
advantage from this was that pupils cannot print if they are not logged on,
this prevents random printing!   !NetScrap creates a dummy !Scrap directory
in the users network area if one does not already exist and points all the
users of !Scrap to this dummy directory.  If the pupils delete this
directory then !NetScrap will automatically recreate this directory the next
time !NetScrap is seen.  The memory overheads are non-existant.  Files are
occasionally left behind in the dummy scrap directory but this is usually
due to some error with the application using scrap.  I counted the memory
requirements of theses dummy directories of twenty of our network users and
found it to be a massive 0K!  The application itself is only 5K so we are
justifiably satisfied with our solution.

There is one unforeseen niggle.  The first time the dummy scrap directory is
created an error message 'Expression is a String' is generated.  If the user
clicks on Cancel everything just works!

I must acknowledge D. Taylor of Room 20 software for his assistance.