Sharing other files in distributed setup

[pegasus20]

As a relative novice to EFB, I would like some advice about sharing folders.   I have a two computer setup, with main FS computer with Dataprovider and a Displayunit (DU1)installed, and the second computer  with a Displayunit (DU2) installed.   I have installed and configured everything as per documents and all seems to work OK across the network and on both DU's.   

My questions are:

(i)   At present, the four folders for Aircraft,  Library, Flight logs and Routes, as defined in the "Folders and Links" tab of the Settings option, appear separately for each DU on both computers.    Although there seems to be no reference about this in the manuals, can an instance of any of these 4 folders (say in DU1) be shared across the network and defined as the same location in DU2?   This would be particularly advantageous for the Routes folder, as EBR files defined on, say DU1, do not currently appear in the EBR files load option in DU2, because their source is different.      Are their any problems in doing this, if say both DU's are working at the same time, as they would now share one set of these folders?

(ii)  In the online section of any DU, you can download and setup links for fir.dat and servoinfo.dat for use with VATSIM.     Similar to the point in (i), is it appropriate to just download one set of these two files, say to put in the appropriate location for the main FS computer,  and point the links in the Online setting of DU2 to this same location?

I hope this makes sense.

Thanks

Keith.

 

[aivlasoft]

Hi Keith,

 

(i) Basically you can create shared folders for each of these four folders. You should only keep in mind that for all of these folders reading and writing happens in different situations.

Once the checklists are defined and attached to a certain aircraft, there is more or less only read access to this folder. So sharing between different DisplayUnits should not be a problem . Same for the library folder. Once the library is installed, I guess it will not really change while in flight. So there should also not be a problem there.

The flight logs folder is accessed when the flight log will be saved. Since this is done by each DU, it might be a problem because each DU writes at more or less the same time. Maybe it's better to keep this folder unique for each DU. Sharing the routes folder makes sense, especially in a home cockpit where you have two DisplayUnits and you only want to create a route on one of these DUs. Just make sure that not both pilots are creating and saving the same route at the same time.

 

(ii) The VATSIM files are static files which will be read by each DisplayUnit. There is a default location for them "C:\Users\[username]\Documents\AivlaSoft\EFB\UserData\Online\Vatsim". I do not recommend to share this location.

[pegasus20]

Hi Urs

Thanks for your reply.  I feel happy now to go ahead and share those folders which you feel should be OK, particularly the Routes folder, and keep the others unique to their DU.

Regards

Keith