Hosts Problem

[Ted S]

Greetings,

I've got a couple of questions for all of the FMP experts because my problem has this casual FMP guy baffled.

We're running FMP3.0v6 on W2K client workstations and 3.0v4 Server version on a W2K Server. Yes I know I'm working on vintage FMP but my company hasn't wanted to spring for the newer versions because we are and have been in the process of phasing out FileMaker.

Anyway, FMP has been running hands-off for years and suddenly last week it started to hiccup. What's happening is the users are not able to connect because after pressing the HOSTS button because the list comes up blank. We have been solving the problem by restarting the FMP service but it is happening too often (every few minutes/hours) for this to be a viable option.

I thought it might be file corruption so I used FILE - RECOVER on ALL files but that didn't fix the problem. We've looked at all of the network stuff and that doesn't seem to be the problem either.

During my research I retrieved a copy of the suspect file from our tape backup of a month ago and was surprised to find that the current day file size is 45M whereas the older file was 50M. We're pretty sure that nobody is deleting records because we have tight controls on those who have access to the higher passwords. Is it normal for a file to shrink in size as time goes on in a situation like this? There dooesn't appear to be any records missing.

-Ted

[jasonwood]

Unfortunately I don't know the answer to your main question, but...

Could the file size be explained by the different drive? Some media has larger blocks, so if there are a lot of small files, they will take up more space on the disk. Not sure if this could make up for that big a difference... and I don't know anything about Tape media.

Also, you better be sure you want to phase out FileMaker because this month is your last chance to upgrade for upgrade pricing. After December 31 (I believe), you will have to pay the full cost (box or volume license) to upgrade from versions prior to 5... so it will be much more expensive to change your mind in the new year!

[Vaughan]

"suddenly last week it started to hiccup"

First find out what change was made to the setup last week. Network, server config...?

[Ted S]

No changes were made to either FileMaker or the network. Here are some of the the things that I have done in no particular order:

1. Performed a recovery on ALL files.

2. Reinstalled FMP Server.

3. Installed FMP Server on a different box.

4. Checked the FMP logs and W2K Event Viewer. No particular user seems to be heart of the matter.

5. Pinging the server during the FMP outage returns good results.

6. Installed FMP on a dedicated box.

My next thought is to do an export maybe in CSV, then a compress or whatever it's called, and then re-import. I'm thinking that DB files don't usually shrink in size so maybe there's a chunk of something missing although the number of records in the current DB is greater than the 30 day old version.

-Ted

[BobWeaver]

Are you using TCP/IP to access the files? Is the server's IP address set manually, or is it assigned dynamically? Could be that the server IP address got changed, and the clients don't know where the files went.

[Vaughan]

Temp files. Make sure FM has enough temp disk space. Do a cleanup and see if that helps.

[Ted S]

We're running TCP/IP only and the server has a static address. Temp files should be ok, we just moved the whole thing to its own dedicated server.

-TS

[djgogi]

And you have individuated the problem:

every single file has the local host or previous IP address saved in every script and every relationship.

To avoid such problems see my post "Avoid hardlinking hosted files" in

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=articles&Number=51159&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=21&fpart=1

Dj

[Ted S]

I'm pretty sure the problem isn't a problem with IP addresses embedded in scripts because scripts never really come into play. The user strictly goes FILE - OPEN - HOSTS and the list is completely missing. In fact I think that fmhosts.txt file is empty on nearly all of the workstations because the local hosts normally shows all of the files. Remote users connect via Terminal Server so there's really no difference for them.

The thing that really bothers me is the fact that one file is smaller than it was 30 days ago yet nothing was intentionally deleted.

-TS

[Ted S]

Yikes! moments ago a user finally contacted us and said that everytime he tries to connect to FileMaker it seems to be down. We quickly ran over to his workstation and confirmed that the moment he clicks the HOSTS button the world ends. So we can finally make the thing crash. I don't know the exact cause at this point but we did notice that he has some funky IP addresses at the OS level. When we figure out what the real cause is I'll make a posting here.

Thanks everybody,

-Ted

[Ted S]

Hello everybody,

We believe that the problem is now fixed although we still don't know the details of the cause. When we found time to work on the offending client machine yesterday his whole PC was in pretty tough shape. The mouse was cutting out and the W2K event viewer wouldn't display because of some sort of error. During the investigation we noticed that the user hadn't bounced his machine in a very, very long time. The first thing we did was reboot his system and just for grins we fired up FMP and it connected just fine.

So, the actual cause is still unknown but I am now keenly aware that one messed up client can bring the whole system down. By the way, chkdsk found no errors.

-Ted