(Simple) Client only machines use a DP4 network requester program to communicate with a single, usually fixed, server. A DP4 network requester replaces the regular DP4 database manager on these machines. All database accesses by application programs on the client machines are handled by the specific server machine with which they are in communication; there are no databases on the client machine.
Obviously, at least one machine somewhere must be configured to act as a server. You can use any of the possible server configurations as a server for somple network clients. Refer to How To Choose an Appropriate Networking Configuration for a comparison of the various possibilities. The simplest server configuration, the Server Only configuration is described here.
Instructions for loading a machine as a simple client only machine can be found here.
Simple client only configurations have the following limitations compared with resilient configurations:
If a server or the link to it fails, the clients using that server will terminate (unless they contain their own specially written code to handle network errors).
Different client machines can access different servers, but each client can access only one server (unless you use the −server_name command tail or your application uses named connection facilities as described in The -server_name Command Tail for Applications).
Programs such as DBCHECK, DBBACKUP and DBRESTOR, when run on a client, work on the remote database. It is strongly recommended that such programs be run only on server machines. Running these programs over a network will cause a large increase in the amount of data transfer across the network and adversely affect performance of the system.