Hi 360 Works Official Product Support Zulu - FileMaker, iCal & Google Calendar forum,

About 10 years later after the installation of a Zulu server on a FileMaker Server, the server starts acting strangely and does not accept connections anymore, it seems like a low level TCP thing, far to many sockets in time_wait. 

Of course these things do not happen all by themselves, but it's hard to figure out what triggered it. Workload is about the same, in fact there's less calendars than before, filters on the calendar request have always limited the amount of traffic, and folks don't have more events than before. Of course there are FileMaker Server updates, macOS updates and Java updates that could be the underlying cause of the intermittent lock ups of the Zulu server - a few times per day.

I'm not the IT manager, but the FileMaker developer, and was therefore only called in when the problem did not get resolved after more than 10 days of "suffering", as my customer calls it.

First advice I gave was to isolate the Zulu Server - imho the customer has far too many things running on the same machine - on a completely new Mac, so we have less moving parts. Yesterday evening I did the standalone install, and because of standalone config, I changed the XML file with the IP address of the server from 127.0.0.1 to the IP address of the FIleMaker Server, changed the deployment script in FileMaker to use the IP address of the server to the IP address and port of the Zulu server.

Presto, it worked right away, using http requests in iCal - we currently use subscription only.

Long intro, sorry. Now for the https part.

Not really clear in the documentation how to implement https when having a Zulu standalone install. Using the standard installation on the FileMaker Server, it is clear we can use the web server included with FileMaker, and everything is fine and configured for us.

For the standalone version, I'm overlooking something in the documentation I guess. I cannot find where it says how to correctly do this. I understand I have to have a webserver instance on the Zulu Server, right? I would like to go for the least complicated, and most stable solution. Don't we all.

Thanks for any help, official or unofficial.

Hi Peter,

I would like to get a little more information on your setup, are you using Apache as your web server? If not, what server are you attempting to use for you custom installation?

Regards,

Conner McAuliffe

360Works Support Team

I will attempt any webserver you recommend in your documentation 🙂 so currently none, just a plain vanilla install of macos on an M1 mini.

IMHO you should promote the name of this kind of installation to “standalone” instead of “custom” and provide full documentation on how to do that.

As you probably know, Claris recommends not running any extra software on the FMS machine, so this is not such an odd request.

I hope my reaction wasn't  too harsh, English is not my native language, and where I live we tend to speak our minds rather directly.

Let me rephrase that last post. Please advice which web server I should install.

Hi Peter,

No that is quite alright, your response was not received harshly at all! We would recommend installing and using Apache web server, this will handle the ssl connections.

You will need to install an ssl certificate into that web server. Then you would need to configure Apache to forward requests to zulu.

Below are the rules are installer writes to the Apache config file when you run the installer in FileMaker Server and you will be doing the same thing just manually. 

#zulu begin

ProxyPass /zulu ajp://127.0.0.1:42424/zulu retry=1 timeout=7200

Redirect /.well-known/caldav /zulu/.well-known/caldav

#zulu end

You will need to add the above rules manually to your Apache configuration file.

Here is a link to some helpful documentation in regards to Apache and setting up ssl connections, specifically focusing on the Forward Proxies and Reverse Proxies/Gateways section.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_proxy.html

Regards,

Conner Mcauliffe

360Works Support Team

Hi Conner, sorry not to get back immediately.

I was about to search for an Apache distribution to download and install, but then I wondered: what about a FileMaker Server worker install?

Wouldn't it be logicial to install this? It contains an Apache server, not?

If that makes sense, what about the Zulu installer? Would it make the necessary modification as described above?

Somehow this all surprises me. I would expect the 360Works Wiki to elaborate a bit more on installating Zulu on a seperate machine, instead of just on the FileMaker Server itself.