Installing Window Service Applications for Eclipse

Since the release of Windows 2003 (and XP sp2) services cannot refer to mapped drives in order to access files on a machine or network (see full details here). This creates a difficulty for because the NETDIR setting for the BDE Administrator needs to be set in such a way that the server sees the path here with the same path structure as the workstations that run Eclipse, although the same drive letter is not required. To there are two ways to achieve this, but Windows 2003 only allows you to use one of them because of the restrictions that Microsoft introduced on services using mapped drives.

Option A. (Windows NT, W2K Only)

Map a virtual drive on your server to the same share that all workstations running Eclipse use. So just as your workstation sees then share as a drive, so does the server. So if you have shared the folder C:\OurData\EclipseData such that for the workstations, ...\EclipseData is the H: drive, it will also be seen as a drive on the server (the actual drive letter doesn't matter)

Option B. (Windows NT, W2K, XP & Windows 2003)

Create a very small partition on the server for the sole purpose of hosting the small pdoxusrs.net file that the NETDIR setting will create. The partition only need be a few megabytes and because it only hosts a single file, there are not security issues with all users mapping directly to it.

Below are some examples of correct and incorrect drive mapping configurations:

Correct

Workstation A: (NETDIR = H:\EclipseData\NetFileFolder\) 
Workstation B: (NETDIR = F:\EclipseData\NetFileFolder\) 
Server: (NETDIR =J:\EclipseData\NetFileFolder\)

or

Workstation A: NETDIR = J:\)
Workstation B: NETDIR = J:\)
Server: (NETDIR = Z:\)

Incorrect

Workstation A (NETDIR = H:\EclipseData\NetFileFolder\) 
Workstation B (NETDIR = F:\EclipseData\NetFileFolder\) 
Server (NETDIR =C:\OurData\EclipseData\NetFileFolder\)

Note 1. If you have created a virtual drive on the server for the purposes of the NETDIR path, you should NOT set your data path in Eclipse Multi-Company Utility to this drive. Use real drives on the
server not mapped ones. This is because the BDE does not access database files efficiently if they are on virtual drives on the same machine and you will soon start getting error messages.

Note 2:  Some IT people might be wondering why we can get around all the complexity of partitions and mapped drives by using UNC paths. Well, Eclipse 2.4 DOES support UNC paths for the NETDIR, Token and Data - however, the performance of the BDE drops significantly when using UNC paths, so we would NOT recommend this option.