OPTI‐NET at Hertfordshire Libraries, Arts and Information
| Date | 01 April 1995 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040582 |
| Pages | 15-17 |
| Published date | 01 April 1995 |
| Author | Richard Church |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
OPTI-NET at
Hertfordshire
Libraries, Arts and
Information
by Richard Church, IT Support Librar-
ian,
Hertfordshire Libraries, Arts and
Information
According
to
Chris Batt's Information
Technology
in
Public Libraries (Fifth
Edition,
Library
Association,
1994) Hertfordshire
is
one of
only three public libraries
to
report
a
network
in
operation which provides CD-ROM
access over a Local Area
Network.
This
article
outlines
the
trials
and
tribulations
of
developing
a
system under tight
constraints.
Hertfordshire Libraries, Arts and Information
(HLAI) set up a CD-ROM network in May 1993.
Initially, the CD network was offered only on the
LAN at our headquarters in Hatfield. The choice of
network system was left to our Facilities Manage-
ment contractor ITNet, who suggested OPTI-NET,
mainly (I think) because they had used OPTI-NET
before. Our LAN operating system was, and still
is,
IBM OS/2 LAN Server version 1.3. This was
already obsolete then; one of its disadvantages
being lack of support for CD-ROM.
The original hardware suggested by ITNet was a
fairly low-end IBM 486SX Value Point PC, with
two Hitachi stacks of 4 non-SCSI CD drives. The
hardware was extremely easy to set up and worked
well, but the software setup on the server and
workstation was quite tricky.
I recently upgraded the hardware to an Elonex
486DX with 3 stacks of
7
SCSI CD drives — a
mix of Hitachi and Premier Products' Netstack —
all of which were a pain to set up, mainly due to
useless manuals. SCSI drives were chosen partly
because Hitachi don't make their proprietary easy-
to-set-up bus any more, partly in case we upgrade
our LAN to Novell 4.1 which has built-in support
for SCSI CD networking. The Hitachi drives were
'selected' because they were already there (the
existing users didn't complain — they got 8 older
drives and gave up 7 newer ones, that good old
Hitachi proprietary bus allowed 8 drives per
adapter
card).
The Netstack drives were suggested
by the dealer when they found out that Hitachi no
longer made non-SCSI drives. This all sounds
horribly hit and miss, but that's life (and probably
my career with it).
Along with the hardware upgrade, I upgraded to
OPTI-NET version 2.10 which seems very stable.
The previous version worked almost all the time,
but I was never quite sure why. The new version
loves SCSI drives, allowing you to have up to 255
of them without bothering with DOS drive letters.
One big problem I have is that it is not possible to
do any networked CD database installations. Since
we are not using Novell as our LAN operating
system, OPTI-NET allows sharing CD-ROM DOS
drive letters over the network but does not allow
shared drives for data. Each database is installed
on each workstation as if it was a standalone CD
database. This means updates (monthly with
BookBank) must be done by manually re-installing
at each workstation. Fortunately I have someone I
delegate this to.
All our CD workstations are DOS / Windows 3.1
machines. For LAN purposes they use the DOS
LAN Requester component of the OS/2 LAN
Server. This consumes lots of conventional DOS
memory (we're talking obsolete OS/2 1.3 here
remember) and is not happy with the Microsoft
CD Extensions (MSCDEX) which is used to
allocate drive letters for real physical and net-
worked logical CD-ROM drives. Fortunately you
can load and unload the DOS LAN Requester in
and out of memory. Even more fortunately, the
clever people at OPTI-NET have found a way of
unloading MSCDEX from memory, a trick I
haven't found elsewhere. The result of all this is a
complex scheme of DOS batch files which load
and unload the various bits and pieces of software.
I am the architect of
these,
and justly proud of
them, but it all hangs together by a thread and
sometimes it all crashes down.
We don't network any Windows titles, not by
design, it's just that none of the titles we network
happen to be Windows ones. I have done some
experimenting with OPTI-NET's Windows
workstation setup, and this seems to work fine. It
even seems to co-exist with our DOS LAN
VINE 101 (December 1995)
—
15
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