B Campbell

The filemaker documentation is pretty clear on how to set up the server and file you want to share via ODBC from with in Filemaker. However it did take some trial and error to set up the connection with the ODBC admin in OS X. Its been a while since i did this but I'll give you what i remember. You need to place the ODBC driver and ini files in the system Library/ODBC/ (I think i had to create the ODBC folder). Then set the Owner to "System" with Read/write, Group "Admin" read only. This applies for all files with in the ODBC folder. Then open the ODBC admin, create a new driver. Give it a description, i used "Sequelink ODBC". Driver file "/Library/ODBC/SequeLink.bundle/Contents/MacOS/ivslk18.dylib". Set up file i left empty. Define as "System". select OK. You then create a System DSN. When it asks what driver type "Sequelink ODBC". You ll then need to name that Data Source... and give it a description. You ll need to configure the following five item for the driver. User Value (user name in FM that you want to access the database) Password Value (for the above user) Host Value (the ip address of the FM server box) Port 2399 Server/DataSource Value ( the table name of the data you want to access) Then press OK and you should be good to go.

I am hosting a database on OS X Tiger Server edition and accessing it from a Windows 2000 computer via ODBC rather then hosting it on Windows as you describe. With this setup i have had no issues making the ODBC connection. I used the same firewall ports as with the FM 7 setup. I did however use the new FM 8 plug in as well as the new ODBC driver supplied on FM 8 Server installation disks. I do seem to remember seeing those error numbers while configuring my FM 7 configuration and i believe it was either a firewall port or a permissions that was causing it. Hope that helps.

Update UPS Worldship is now receiveing its shipping and invoice data from FM7 Server Advanced. It seems that even though underscores are supposed to be ODBC compliant, they aren't when it comes to UPS Worldship. I removed all underscores from the table names and field names in my Filemaker database and that solved all my issues. Its not the fastest ODBC connection I have done but its definatly faster then entering all the data manually.

I have managed to get the UPS ODBC mapping wizard to see the Filemaker data source as well as query the tables with out much hassle. The Problem I've run into is that the UPS ODBC Mapping wizard will only return 5 records + 1 fragmented record in the third query. I have been trying to solve this problem for a couple of weeks now and UPS doesnt seem to have any idea what is wrong either. Filemaker definatly supports the query i have written, in fact i can get Excel to import thousands of records from FM 7 using the exact same query and driver in a matter of seconds. In UPS Connect it takes upwards of a minute and half for the same query and it will only return the 6 records mentioned above. Personally i believe the UPS ODBC Mapping wizard version 7 has a bug in it that is causing my issues and given the tech support I've received from UPS i doubt its going to be solved any time soon. If you have any luck getting this to work I'd love to hear about it.