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winSTARS and NMCI

December 23, 2003

To: STARS system administrators
Navy computer support personnel

With the rollout of NMCI, ZOA Consulting's help desk has been fielding a lot of questions lately from STARS users and IT support people about how to prepare winSTARS for the transition to NMCI. The following is some basic information that will answer your most frequently asked questions. If you have more questions, feel free to send an email to support@zoa.com or phone us at 415-566-9949.

  • NMCI Approval: winSTARS version 2.19 has been approved for use on NMCI networks under ISF # 67470. You can verify this information in the DADMS database under the acronym winSTARS or via DADMS ID 9537.

  • Network Installation: To run winSTARS on an NMCI network, your first step is to create a shared server directory on the NMCI server to which your STARS users will have full read/write/delete rights. The second step is to copy all the files from your current network shared winSTARS subdirectory into the new NMCI folder. Note that it is not necessary to "install" winSTARS on the NMCI server. All you have to do is to copy the ten essential winSTARS files into a single shareable folder on the NMCI server. The ten essential winSTARS files are:
    winstars.exestarsdb.mdb
    winstars.hlpamerican.vtd
    winstars.mdwcustom.dic
    winstar0.mdwversion.mem
    stru2000.mdwheaders.txt

  • Performance Tuning: Depending on how your NMCI server is configured and tuned, you may see an improvement in performance for winSTARS after making the switch from your current network to your new NMCI server. However, if you see significant degradation of performance, please see our performance notes posted on this website.

  • Network Tuning: If the switch to NMCI causes your winSTARS to run slow and to suffer from frequent database corruptions, ask your NMCI support staff to check their switches. Nine times out of ten, NMCI will set their switches at Autonegotiate (the default setting). Changing these switches to Full Duplex will result in an immediate improvement of winSTARS as well as all your other applications ... especially shared databases.

  • Workstation Configuration: In order for any workstation to run winSTARS, various DLL and OCX library files must be installed in the Windows System folder. Your NMCI providers will deliver workstations that have these library files pre-installed. It doesn't matter which version of the winSTARS DLL and OCX files are preinstalled by NMCI because all versions of winSTARS library files are the same.