Before setting up DP4 networking, at least in a development environment, you should first ensure that stand-alone DP4 is installed and working on both server and client machines. (However if you are installing the DP4 Terminal Client it is preferable NOT to have DP4 installed). The appropriate DP4 installation guide should help you with installing DP4. Once you have everything working you can remove databases on the client machines unless you are using some form of resilience configuration. On Windows NT family operating systems you will need to be an administrator in order to set up DP4 and DP4 networking, as you will want to be able to configure the computer and start and stop services.
Make sure the required networking components of the operating system are correctly set up. This is usually very easy for Win32 or Linux machines. It can be very difficult on Unix and other platforms.
DP4 TCP/IP network clients find the DP4 server by name. In order to be able to successfully connect to the DP4 server you must be able to 'ping' the server by the same name that you intend to specify for DP4 networking. On a LAN it is very unusual for there to be problems connecting via DP4 once you have got the network to a state where ping works. If you are operating over the Internet or a private WAN there are some additional considerations:
If you are going through a proxy server, firewall, or router, then you will probably need to "open the port" that DP4 will use (usually 5000). Consult the documentation for the relevant software/hardware to find out how to do this.
Even if you are planning to use a resilience configuration, then it is a good idea to initially set up machines to use either server only or client only networking first. If you set up multiple resilience immediately you may end up with an apparently working network when in fact all you have is a local connection.