Is my brain dead or what....

OK, I have been thinking about this for a couple of days in between my normal daily tasks. I need to know if I am missing something or is Informix really screwed up when it comes to client/server architecture. Assumptions: 1) I don't have a spell checker, and most normal viewers will skip over this little detail. 2) The scope of my ranting and ravings will be limited to I-NET/ODBC and Informix's 7.1x on UNIX Background: A large client has 1000+ PCs in its corporate headquarters running windows 3.11 (Among other things). It is mainly a NOVEL network, read IPX. Their goal is to have several small VB (Visual Basic) type apps run against some Informix databases. Problem: 1) To use ODBC connectivity, do we need to IP on each PC ? Putting IP on the PC's is not an easy task. Informix does not work well with DHCP. and think about trying to manage 1000 additional nodes in your DNS and network! 2) Informix On Unix bases their authentication on UNIX. This is a problem in that Informix relies on /etc/hosts and /etc/hosts.equiv to manage all the PC's connection. [Skip .rhosts and .netrc files, You don't want to risk the wrath of captain safety. ;-] The problem occurs in that I now have to manage a database on all the pc's, their users, and what server applications that they can connect to. Since Informix gets its user authentication from the user_id, and passwd, I have two choices: 1) create a unique user id for all users 2) create a set of authentication routines and maintain a user_id / passwd table scheme within Informix. When using /etc/hosts.equiv, I can use the + sign to allow any user from that PC to connect, however, this too can be considered a security risk. Solutions: 1) If I am not braindead, then Informix needs to get their act together so that we can develop large scale client/server applications. 2) switch to web based technologies and use either Web objects or Netscape to handle security and front end processing. 3) Drink until I have to look up to see the curb in front of the local pub. Now #3 does sound appealing. [Right Tom?], but alas, being an old man, I can't continue to abuse my body in that way. So, what I am doing wrong? -Uncle Mikey.