FMU and Panther

[hidoe]

Has anyone tested this out to see if it is more stable? I read through the forum and can't see having to reboot the FMU daily to prevent it from crashing.

Also, I've been manually opening the database files every time the server needs to be rebooted. Is there any way to automate this? With the standalone, I could put aliases in the Startup folder. With FMU, I have to open the files via the "Open Remote" menu.

Any suggestions?

[dwal]

I have FMU v6 running on Panther since last Friday. It so far has solved the instability problem. There has been no failures since Friday. Prior to this FMU was running on 10.2.8 FMU and would fail every 24-36 hours.

[Vaughan]

I'm running FMPU on Mac OS X 10.1.5 and the machine has not been restarted for almost a month. Dead stable, I tend to forget about it.

The only time I touch it is when the FMS box that hosts the web-shared files goes down or the network drops out, then FMPU complains about the databases no longer being available. But that's not FMPU's fault.

I happen to have a few retail boxes of 10.1 lying around. As a special deal to FM Forum members you can send me your 10.2 boxes and I'll swap them for the vastly more stable 10.1.

[Jeff Spall]

HI, there's nothing inherently unstable about FileMaker and the Mac platform, though I gotta confess having problems myself in the past.

I have FMP unlimited running on both classic (9.2.2) and OSX on X-serve (10.2.6) and both are now completely stable. A couple of them are on the public internet and subject to all the regular attacks and stuff.

None of them have been restarted in the last three months, and only then because we moved the servers.

regards, Jeff

[jfurness]

hmm, I disagree. We've been having problems with running Filemaker 5.5 and 6.0 for many months now on several servers with a few different versions of Mac OSX, the only time i experienced any reliability was when i was runing OSX10.1

Think you will find that many many other people besides me have had problems too. Not sure why you are the 'chosen' one?! How many hits do your servers get? - just wondered whether there is any correlation between number of hits and reliability.

[tmoney]

Jeff Spall said:

HI, there's nothing inherently unstable about FileMaker and the Mac platform, though I gotta confess having problems myself in the past.

I have FMP unlimited running on both classic (9.2.2) and OSX on X-serve (10.2.6) and both are now completely stable. A couple of them are on the public internet and subject to all the regular attacks and stuff.

None of them have been restarted in the last three months, and only then because we moved the servers.

regards, Jeff

Which version of FMU are you running? My FMU 5.5 on OSX 10.2.something is still crashing pretty regularly.

Has anybody else been using OSX 10.3 for FMU 5.5 or 6 yet? It's hard to trust just one post saying 10.3 has solved the stability issues. It would be more encouraging if others were using it as well - especially for more than 2 or 3 days.

[kenneth2k1]

jfurness said:

Think you will find that many many other people besides me have had problems too. Not sure why you are the 'chosen' one?! How many hits do your servers get? - just wondered whether there is any correlation between number of hits and reliability.

There may be something to this. My online db gets only about 30-40 logged users/week and it has never crashed (Running Server .2.8 now)

As far as using Panther, I think the concensus would say NEVER implement technology that is only a couple of weeks old.

Ken

[dwal]

This is day number 11 for running FMU 6 on Panther. No stability problems. Restarted once for a security update and another time to complete a software installation. I am so happy!

[Anatoli]

Does it mean that FM was ready for X, but all that problems was because of bugs in OS?

[CobaltSky]

Anatoli said:

Does it mean that FM was ready for X, but all that problems was because of bugs in OS?

Quite possibly, Anatoli...

I note that a number of other FM 'quirks' on X are also gone now that Panther has arrived.

For instance under Jaguar, if users double clicked a file, FM would launch but the file would not open - they would have to double click the file again to get it to open.

Meanwhile, FMv6 on classic under Jaguar exhibited odd symptoms such as the option key appearing to be permanently 'on' in layout mode, so that dragging a field always copied it.

It would seem that both these problems are no more with the advent of Panther.

[Anatoli]

If that's so we own some more credit to FMI, which was taken out by Apple Inc.

[Jeff Spall]

Hi, on the Classic machines, we have copies of 5.0.3 unlimited and 5.5 unlimited, both running with OS 9.2.2.

On OSX, I have 6.0v4 on OS10.2.6

The most significant thing I did to make sure all was stable was to patch the web companion up to the latest version and to occasionally clean up the databases by doing a "recover" on them. Before that, I was getting regular quits of FileMaker.

regards, jeff

PS we have a new G5 in today on evaluation: awsome speed and all solid aluminium case which looks much better than the pictures. If the 64-bit architecture goes into the X-Serve, we're thinking of porting our HP-unix systems over!

[Anatoli]

I would love to see some FM benchmarks with 4 million records on G5 and P4 with the same drivers. Anyone has that?

[Steve T.]

Hi, hidoe! I have seen various seemingly conflicting responses and folks tend to say their versions of OS and FMP but I suspect that people w/the same versions may still have different results due to different versions of Web Companion, slightly different configurations, different loads/hits, different db's w/different CDML urls which may confuse different bots/crawlers,etc. I hear good things about FMP and Panther so I'll keep my fingers crossed but I'm doing great w/FMP-U 5.5 and 10.2.6.

As to your auto-launch question, I have Mac OS X auto-launch FileMaker using the LOGIN ITEMS feature in the SYSTEM PREFERENCES. The 2nd item I have it auto-launch is the Web Security db. When the Web Security db launches, I have it auto-execute a script on opening (FMP Document Prefs) to open all my other db's. It works great. We had trouble auto-launching all the db's individually from the OS... they timed out or something. Let me know how it goes w/you though...

--ST

[Vaughan]

I managed to cobble this AppleScript together that opens FMP and the Web Security database very reliably on MacOS X 10.1.5. I'm sure it could be optimised but this was a whole afternoon's work for me and it's the most complex AS I've ever done!

tell application "FileMaker"

activate

open file "Macintosh HD:Applications:FileMaker Pro 6 Folder:Web Security:Web Security.fp5"

end tell

tell application "Finder"

activate

set visible of every process whose visible is true and name is not "FileMaker Pro" to false

end tell