Thanks Michael,

Yes, that is good to experiment with.  I have found that many modern offices have a decent enough wireless connection with a router wired into their local network that you can easily use a wireless front end to connect to a back end on a computer dedicated to house the backend that is always left on.

Suddenly losing the front end / back end connection for almost any length of time or for any reason is a recipe for potential disaster, database corruption, and sometimes data loss.

This is also why it’s an extremely bad idea to attempt to use a front end / back end file sharing scenario over VPN.

A way to circumvent issues like this is to setup a wired dedicated client PC that users can remote into using Microsoft’s RDP protocol or other products like VNC, Citrix, GotoMyPC, or (what we at HCI use and I believe Bruce uses) Splashtop.

Of course if multiple users want to use it at once, you’ll need either separate PCs or a server or system that would support multiple user’s logging in with their own session.  We’ve explored a fully outside solution using a remote server / client solution with Sherweb.  This allows you to set up a remote system that could be accessible only via VPN if desired which would allow front end / back end database setups from anywhere in the world.  The action would all be happening within a virtual server that would always be on and the connection between the front end and back end database would never disconnect.  This solution would require the client to connect to the virtual server and launch the app from their virtual desktop (or there are ways to actually do this and make it look like an app is running on your local PC, which is really cool).

That is a relatively expensive solution though, as it requires an ongoing rental of Sherweb or Microsoft resources.  You might want to ask Steve H more about pricing and configuration of that because he actually worked with Sherweb to do some quotes for some of our existing customers and we are now in their reseller program.

Jon Halder

Halder Consulting, Inc.

Contact:(630) 423-4994 x101
Fax:(888) 292-1052

https://www.halderconsulting.com

From: Michael Krailo <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2020 8:01 AM
To: Allen <[email protected]>; [email protected]; Bruce Myron <[email protected]>; Jocelyn Fenton <[email protected]>; John Davy <[email protected]>; Jonathan Halder <[email protected]>; Marilou Vardeman <[email protected]>; Steve Montyro <[email protected]>; Steven Halder <[email protected]>; Tony Sulpizio <[email protected]>
Subject: Never Stop Learning

I embarked on a quest to test out a split database yesterday under different network situations. Up until this point, I have not really worked with a split DB on a properly set up network so I thought it’s time I better get up to speed on this.

First of all, testing on a completely hardwired office network worked flawlessly and I’m impressed with how easy it is to update the FE to make changes now. I won’t be going back.

The frustration came in when I attempted to throw a wireless computer into the mix. What a pain! I just wanted to see what happened and it was torture just setting up the shares and getting the network settings worked out so I could at least share files (long story there). I know you are not supposed to do this but I put the BE on the wireless computer and although I was able to get it to work for a while, the BE computer would go to sleep and the connection would break and…. well you can probably imagine what happened. Not a good idea folks, but I had to see what happened myself. The connections were very slow when they did work and then when it disconnected there was a lot of swearing at a disobedient computer.

OK, I won’t do that again. On to finding a good NAS to experiment with and getting some good hard drives for it. I thought about using SSD’s but after doing some more research on it, it’s better to just use a good server hard drive in a RAID configuration. Use an SSD for the workstation operating system and HD’s, SAN, or NAS for the larger data.

Here is a very interesting video on SSD technology and life expectancy

If you just want to skip ahead to the conclusion, it’s near the 8min mark in the video but I found the whole video educational.

So I’m pretty excited about moving into the FE/BE world and being able to help clients make the most out of it. It would be nice to have some recommendations on the type of hardware/hard drives that we should recommend to our clients on a typical small office network. Obviously, they have to be on a wired network and somehow disallow any wifi computers from connecting to the backend. How do you do that?