We have a situation where we need to share out a shared folder on a PC running WinXP to more than 10 users. Apparently there is a limit to the number of connections for a shared folder(?).
To add a little complexity, the data can not simply be moved off to a file server, as the software (which we have no control over) which generates the data writes directly to the "c:" drive. This is ultimately the crux of the issue, the software is extremely specialized (controls Liquid Chromatography equipment)- but also unfortunately fragile and not designed to work in a network environment.
We have additional analysis software that can access any "mapped" drive - which works fine - except that we now run out of resources because of the number of users who need to access this data.
We have tried allowing a WEBDAV server act as an intermediary, which works, but is extremely slow because of the number of files in the mapped directory.
We have explored using SAMBA with a Linux server but run into issues sharing out non-local drives.
We have also explored scripting copies of the files to a server, but there are issues with that because the writing software is so fragile, and it is unknown when the file is "closed" (in an automated fashion). This is because the software may appended to the file over an unknown period of time (12-24 hours typically).
Any suggestions?