Neuron on win2003 terminal server

[WikingTOR]

I’m trying to find information about installing and running neuron on a windows 2003 terminal server. Does anyone have experience with this?
Will it work for several students to access the program simultaneous without problems? If anyone has experience with neurons on TS servers I would be glad to hear about it!

[ted]

Will it work for several students to access the program simultaneous without problems?

If each user gets his or her own separate instance of the program in its own memory space, things should be OK except for one very minor possible problem: file locking conflicts might occur in connection with the "working directory" and "recent directory" features. "Working directory" (NEURON Main Menu / File / working dir) allows the user to navigate to a directory of the user's choice, then appends that directory's path to a file located in c:\nrnxx. "Recent directory" (NEURON Main Menu / File / recent dir) allows one to jump to any of the locations that has been stored in that file.

File locking became a problem in Win 3.2 when MicroSoft decided users had to be protected from themselves, but at least there were ways to circumvent it. I haven't heard of any workarounds since Win2K. The symptom of a "problem" would be that, if multiple users are running NEURON at the same time and one of them uses working dir or recent dir, noone else will be able to use working dir or recent dir until the first user exits NEURON.

So by all means try NEURON and see how things go. I bet you have no trouble at all. Even if concurrent use of recent dir and working dir runs afoul of file locking, this is truly no big deal since most users rarely, if ever, use these features, and there are easy ways to avoid having to use them in the first place.

[WikingTOR]

Hi, i have installed it on 2 servers running in cluster and up to 30 students have used the program at the same time, it works fine the only problem is that the program freeze for maybe 30 sec now and then, but other than that it works just fine, at least for our use :)

[hines]

I'm afraid I don't know anything about such a server. I wouldn't know how to distinguish between freezing
and computing between output events. How many processors/cores does the server have?. I can imagine that
everyone presses the Init&Run button, that that could slow things down. Also if virtual memory is used
that can REALLY slow things down.

[WikingTOR]

it could very well be that the cpu hit 100% the servers are running two quad core xeon with 4 gb ram so the ocational freeze could be that all compute at once, but it was not a big problem according to the lecturer