Shutdown procedure

[sal88]

Hi all

Our server decided to shutdown just now due to windows updates. Here is the FMS log:

2019-12-11 17:18:45.641 +0000    Information    745    FM    Stopping FileMaker Server processes...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.675 +0000    Information    704    FM    Stopping Database Server process...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.704 +0000    Information    488    FM    Stopping Database Server...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.734 +0000    Information    410    FM    Stopping FileMaker Database Engine...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.770 +0000    Information    140    FM    Closing database "BS"...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.778 +0000    Information    140    FM    Closing database "Case_Feedback"...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.778 +0000    Information    140    FM    Closing database "ML"...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.778 +0000    Information    140    FM    Closing database "ML_Correspondence"...
2019-12-11 17:18:45.874 +0000    Information    168    FM    Database "BS" closed.
2019-12-11 17:18:45.994 +0000    Information    168    FM    Database "Case_Feedback" closed.
2019-12-11 17:20:34.367 +0000    Information    743    FM    Starting FileMaker Server processes...

As you can see it did not close the last two databases in time. As such, I've just had to wait 30 minutes for one of those two to finish 'checking'. It has now succesfully opened however and we can access it.

Obviously we need to disable such automatic Windows shutdowns. But is there another safety net I can put in place to ensure that no shutdown procedure can complete until all FMS services have stopped? And that FMS services cannot stop until all databases have successfully closed?

Thanks!

[OlgerDiekstra]

Making sure that Windows doesn't restart after updates would suffice in my opinion. You need to be prepared to recover databases anyway. After all, the power grid can fail (a UPS will only keep the server running for so long, although that should buy you enough time to shutdown DB's), hardware in the server can fail causing a BSOD, disks can fail, ransomware, so there are lots of other issues that can happen  that will cause your server to not close DB's properly.

Mitigate what you can, at reasonable cost. Make sure you have a recent backup for instances where the server crashes horribly.

FMS will shutdown DB's before it shuts down itself. Windows however can forcefully shutdown closing processes, regardless whether they are finished. There are some configuration options whether you allow to forcefully close frozen processes (I think the default is 2 minutes), but don't count on that staying the same after updates.

Microsoft doesn't have the best track record when it comes to updates. They fix a lot, but they often also break a lot of stuff that worked just fine prior.

[Wim Decorte]

Best practices are:

- only manually install updates, don't let Windows auto-update.  That gives you a chance to pick a good maintenance window and first run a backup and gracefully close the files yourself

- don't let FMS auto-host files.  For all you know those files may now have some silent corruption that can build up over time.  When something like this happens, trash the files and use your latest backup.  The fact that FMS verified the files and re-opened them is not a guarantee that the files are ok