Windows enhancement: A-Shell now detects duplicate machine names. Previousy, this would have led to the nth instance on machine 2 overwriting the JOBTBL record for the nth instance on machine 1. In order for this to work, you must run the installer/updater to update each workstation, rather than manually installing the update by copying files. It is also important to update the six LIT commands, described in the next item, although the installer will normally take care of this for you.
The installer/updater establishes a unique identifier for each machine and saves it in the HKLM section of the registry, to be used to determine whether an instance with the same machine name as an existing instance is actually the same machine or not. If so, then the new instance can safely overwrite the old one. But if not, an error message is displayed and the new session is not allowed to start.
The error message will indicate the machine name, the user name and jobname of the offending existing instance, and the unique identifiers (8 hex digits) for the two machines. You can use the new SYSTAT/CU switch to display the unique identifiers for existing sessions, which may be helpful in tracking down the offending duplicate-named machine.
Note that duplicate named machines can cause all kinds of problems for Windows networking, but it is not always detected. This new feature should help avoid the ensuing problems in both A-Shell and in the network in general.
Also note that the issue only affects P2P networks; ATE, Terminal Server, and UNIX systems are not subject to the problem and are not affected by the update.
