charrois

I have been having a problem lately and I thought I should ask about it. When I have had to stop my FM server ( running on Mac OS X) to pull files down it often will tell me that it is shutting down, but can take hours before it actually shuts down. I do not have hours to wait, so in the past, I have had to resort to less than friendly means for shutting down the system. I worry as the last time this happened it causes major corruption in one of my databases. Is this a known bug? Is there are work around? Also, when I try to close just one file via the Administration databases it also sits there for hours saying that it is closing. Then I have to shut the entire system down to even get at that one file. I really could use some help here. Cheers, Jeannie

We have been running FileMaker Server 5.5 on a Mac OS 10.1 server for the past month. I ran into a problem with FileMaker Server Config file remembering its preferences, particularly after running a FileMaker 5.5 client locally on the server. FileMaker admitted this was a known problem which they are working on. In the mean time, we editted the preference file to hard code our preferences into the system. I now have another concern about the ability of FileMaker server to clear the cache before shutting down on Mac OS 10.1. I think, and would like to have someone confirm that there are issues. Recently I was making some layout changes while the databases were still being served through the OS 10.1 server. After my changes were made, I had to shut down the server to do some password changes. Upon restarting the server, my layouts were only half there. I believe the cache is not being written back to the hard disk when the server is asked to shut down?? Also I have had issues with corruption of some of the databases once I have started working on them in a single user environment after shutting down the server and pulling them off. No corruption seems to be happening while the files are being hosted through the server. I have my cache set very large at 40 mb. The databases are running nice and fast through the network. I just worry everytime I shut down the server. I am going to put in a shut down script to clear the cache to hard disk. Has anyone else run into issues while running FileMaker Server 5.5 on Mac OS 10.1?

Hi there. I'm trying a few different things to back up a Filemaker database running on Filemaker Server on Mac OS X. I can't determine a good way to do so by using the server's automatic backup capability, since we're backing up our computers with Retrospect, and the last I heard, Retrospect's Mac OS X client is rather "beta-ish" at the moment (on their site, they quite explicitly say how we shouldn't trust it for anything critical). So I'd rather make a copy of the databases regularly on another machine that can be backed up with Retrospect, unless someone can suggest something else. We already have another Mac running System 9.2 (which can itself be backed up with Retrospect) which accesses the database over a TCP/IP network that runs some daily scripts on the database, and I thought it would be a simple matter to just get it to "Save a copy as..." periodically, and have those copies backed up to tape. But when I went to try it, "Save a copy as..." is ghosted. Is that operation impossible when accessing a file over a network (I haven't been able to find a reference to that limitation in any of the documentation I've been reading)? Any other suggestions on how we could get this database backed up safely on a regular basis? Thanks

This database has been a mulituser database for three years now. However, it has evolved dramatically over those three years into a interrelationship of 10 databases. For the first two years the entire system ran without any complications. On September 19th we experienced our first crash with one particular layout causing most of our concern. When one of our admin support people does a daily search for a checkbox flag in a portal she will ultimately (within a couple of mouse clicks or when she goes to change to another layout or database) receive an Illegal Operation and her client will quit. I believe all the scripts are multiuser friendly. I do not use any importing scripts currently in the database. I checked that database with FileMaker 5.0 for windows last night and received the same errors. My database has been stable until after my return from my first Devcon in Palm Desert in September. I think I am going to have to rebuild this structure from scratch, but I want to make sure this is the only option before I take a week of my life to sit down and re-create the database from scratch.

Hi everyone. I'm having a problem that has been frustrating the heck out of me. I have a database I wrote that consistently and repeatedly crashes when running under Windows 98 (program performed an illegal operation and will be shut down...). It really appears to be a bug in Filemaker, especially considering that I've tried it on several different Windows machines, and it crashes on all of them. When I use the database on a Mac, everything works fine. We're also having problems with Filemaker Server on a Mac getting its files corrupted pretty much weekly. We've tried swappin machines, and no luck. Hopefully these problems are also caused by Windows clients connecting to the database and crashing, which may be corrupting the files on the server. I just spend the last 2 solid days trying to reduce the situation to a specific problem area. It seems that a memory leak may be involved, since under different situations, the crash appears at different specific times (but always eventually happens). Unfortunately, the database is quite large and complicated (with lots of portals, related fields that are calculated values using other related values, etc.) so it's been difficult to simplify things and still have it crash. It seems that the simpler we make the database, the less frequently crashes occur, but we've been unable to come up with a specific field or calculation causing the problem. I don't know where to go from here - has anyone encountered some sort of similar behaviour on FileMaker 4.1v3 for Windows? We'd consider upgrading to FileMaker 5.0 if we knew that would fix the problem, but we've been unable to confirm if it would. Thanks for any help or insight you might be able to provide. Jeannie