C-ISAM problem, help needed

Is there anybody who can give me any hints how to solve the following problem: - We have (many) ISAM files on mounted filesystems. - The file systems can be mounted from different computers (with different operating systems). - The ISAM files are created once and are not modified afterwards. - The ISAM files are created and read by C programs. We need a portable implementation of ISAM-files. At first sight, Informix C-ISAM seems to be portable (at least it exists on all platforms we want to support). In our C-ISAM Programmers Manual the following can be found: C-ISAM uses data types that are equivalent to the C language data types on your machine. C-ISAM representation of these data types, however, is machine independent. Great! Unfortunately, in the introduction, we also read: In general, C-ISAM files created with different locking mechanisms are not compatible. Experiments show us that this is true. Even with ISMANULOCK (we do not need any locking!) we cannot access the C-ISAM file from other platforms. We do not want to migrate the files each time they are accessed from a different platform. The second problem is that it seems to be impossible to open a C-ISAM file on a mounted file system. We always have to copy it to a local file system first. Did we miss anything in the documentation? Any hints are welcome. I hope this is not the wrong newsgroup for posting this question. -- S I E T E C | Matthias Moritz, ARC31, Sietec Systemtechnik GmbH & Co OHG | Nonnendammallee 101, D-13629 Berlin, Germany | Phone: +49 (30) 386 24590 (Fax - 27402) | Mail: matthias.moritz@sietec.de