I administer FM DBs from a Mac server 3.0. We are considerably behind times with users running 3.0 or 4.0 on a mixture of Macs and PCs. We will install FM 6.0 in January.

Can I expect everything to change over smoothly?

Maxwell Morlay

I wouldn't expect any problems, but follow good practice and backup all files (preferably to CD-R where they CAN'T be changed) before you start the conversion. Do some reasonable amount of testings after conversion before "going live".

-bd

Maxwell... I just survived this very move from a mac os8.1 server with 16 megs to a dual G4 with 512megs and mirrored drives running OSX 10.2.1. Possible problems:

1) make sure you migrate the files with FMP6.3 or better or your dates will be all messed up. i did not do this and had to do this twice

2) moving user dictionaries is _not_ trivial on OSX

3) not all databases move directly to FMP6. I had FMP 4 and 5, but did not need to use them.

4) FMP Server 5.5 (the latest) supports up to 256 scripts, so you can have 7 backup scripts and backup to a different folder each day of the week.

5) don't let OSX server sleep.

6) you will lose support for appletalk imagewriters under OSX (labels)

7) page margin settings have moved under OSX

8) preview may not work under OSX, so preview using the print driver preview

9) when you move the data, now is the time to eliminate duplicate records

10) YOU MUST ALLOW PORT 5033 if you turn on the firewall!

Thanks for the good information! I didn't assume that the move was to OS X, as we have not migrated a server installation to OS X yet. Server on OS X seems to be "a not quite ready for prime time player" and we have held off pending resolution of the several issues. Glad someone is out there on the "bleeding edge" discovering these problems!

-bd

bd.... so far i have survived. as you can guess, it was pretty crazy for a while moving everyone (server and clients) from os8.1 to osx. my local apple vendor has experience running osx with mirrored drives for online auctions, so that sold me on the move to osx on the server.

Drive mirroring alone is highly overrated as a means of data protection (I was a program manager for an aerospace fault tolerant systems company, Fail-Safe Technology). Most errors are caused by software (which affects both drives), not hardware failures.

For transactions based processes, you can beat mirrored machines. That is why Tandem Computers (now part of HP) went from a $50M to $3B company with the advent of ATM's. Interesting history: http://nonstop.compaq.com/view.asp?IO=NEDBIOOV

-bd

Actually my server machine is a Mac G4 running OS9.x. If you are saying that with OS10 I can expect these problems, then may I assume that OS9.x will be nice and easy?

Maxwell Morlay

hmmm. to me the main purpose of mirroring is to avoid real time downtime if one hard drive goes down. i still backup the data daily. the unintended advantage of mirroring is that the backups are duplicated on two drives so that it is unlikely that both backups will be lost due to a hard drive failure. you are quite correct that this does not protect against software or user failure that affects "the" drive. this does not protect against theft or fire or water damage. thus the need for rotating encrypted backups off site. eventually i can add a fire wire external drive for databackup, but hey i am still recovering from the cost of this upgrade.

If possible... make sure you purchase the upgrade license before the end of the year!

Users of versions 3 and 4 will not qualify for upgrade pricing come January 1, 2003, so it could save you mega-bucks if you have a lot of users!!

I am not 100% confident this change applies to volume licenses as well, but it likely does.