FMS 7 Preview on OS X

[spragueg]

I just installed FMS 7 Preview on a 500 MHZ G4 with 512MB of ram, running 10.3.3. Install asks if you want automatic startup or manual. I chose automatic. Install went smoothly. Asked me to restart. I guess the restart is to trigger the "automatic" script to get the server running.

Things I've noticed so far...

Default location for database files has changed. Now resides in the Library folder.

The new FileMaker Server Admin application seems to combine the fuctionality of the OS 9 5.5 version and the OSX FileMakerServerConfig.app application. The interface its a bit odd but better than nothing.

Opening databases is now really fast. Used to be a few sec of lag. (Might be our network not sure?)

Finds, as noted in previous posts, are faster. Especially when searching on unstored/unindexed fields.

When a solution opens you dont see a "opening somedatabase from..." dialog for each table like on 5.5 thank god so sick of seeing those.

Some non server related stuff...

The default install of FileMaker Pro 7 does not include adding an internet protocol helper app entry for FMP7. Any url starting with "FMP7://..." gets passed to FileMaker Pro 6. I used a thrid party control panel called "more internet" to add it manually. This is going to be a problem for large installations using urls to access databases. Not sure how this is going to work on windows.

Every solution I have converted so far has performed perfectly with a few minor issues. I had a problem with a script that goes to the last portal row and creates a new portal. The problem was that I have a filed auto entering the current portal row but auto enters "1" no matter what the current portal row is. Not server related but I figued while I am here I would mention it.

I'll give more details as I find them. We are planning to convert/rebuild all our databases (200 files on 3 servers) over to FMS 7 over the next 6 months. I'm sure I'll be back here ranting or asking for help.

Thanks,

g

[spragueg]

I just hooked up the filemaker server to the open direcotry authentication system on one of our Xserves. It's pretty cool. You can set up a fmp file to authenticate to an external server and then add group names to the file and assign them permssions. Then when the users login to a database the server uses the netinfo/open directory database to authenticate the users group membership and allows access to the file accordingly. This is really cool! No more replicating the Netinfo database in fmp file to store users and custom permissions.

[Ender]

spragueg said:

I just hooked up the filemaker server to the open direcotry authentication system on one of our Xserves.

This is what I'm working on right now. I don't have an existing Open Directory, so I'm learning that setup too, but it looks promising.

My only concern is how new users get added and disabled with Open Directory. Our current system allows HR staff to create accounts in FMP when there is a new employee, and when an employee is terminated, their account becomes inactive (custom login solution.) Is this something I.S. staff is going to have to manages now, or do you think I can give HR access to manage Open Directory accounts?

[spragueg]

Ender said:

This is what I'm working on right now. I don't have an existing Open Directory, so I'm learning that setup too, but it looks promising.

My only concern is how new users get added and disabled with Open Directory. Our current system allows HR staff to create accounts in FMP when there is a new employee, and when an employee is terminated, their account becomes inactive (custom login solution.) Is this something I.S. staff is going to have to manages now, or do you think I can give HR access to manage Open Directory accounts?

I guess you could create an interface to open direcory with a custom solution that automatically adds new users from filemaker after they are entered by HR. However I think the whole point of open directory is to have only one database that self replicates to other servers with no management.

You may want to consider using only open direcpry and then set up some kind of interface where HR would make changes directly to that. There may be quite a bit of work involved in making it secure. Also could be alot of work if your existing custom login solution for filemaker has alot of features that limit functions to users and runs deeply through the system that could be difficut to replicate without alot of re-writing fmp scripts.

Lucky for me we dont really use custom access privs for anything other that admin or user access. So the groups on the server are going to provide plenty of control for my existing solutions. If a user belongs to the "timesheet" group then they can get access to any file that has that group specified in the fmp access privs. The great thing is that we used to set up users for the Xserve and then set them up in fmp custom login solution. Now we will only have to do it in open directory and then add them to the appropriate groups.

I would be interested to know how you handle this.

Thanks,

g

[jonathanstark]

One thing to watch out for when using external authentication - make sure you have at least one locally authenticated admin account. Otherwise you won't be able to open the files if you take them off the server for maintenance.

Have not checked this out myself - I read it somewhere.

(what up g-man...)

[joerg]

But has anyone noticed some improvement with the server sided calculation (announced on the official FMS feature site)?

Improve the performance of shared databases

FileMaker Server 7 software makes databases run faster by increasing the performance of operations and taking advantage of server hardware and software components.

NEW! Perform searches and calculations on the server instead of the client.

[Ender]

Searches on unstored calcs are very fast--even over the WAN. You can see results of my speed tests in this thread.

[Kevin Wertz]

I must have missed something here. Do I understand correctly that external server authentication is only for verifying access to the file and assigning the privilege set? The main thing I wanted, and thought we were getting, was for my users to be able to log in using their domain username and password.

[Wim Decorte]

Hi Kevin,

EA will log the user in automatically, if there is an account in the filemaker file that matches the domain group name the user belongs to.

If you set up FMS to use EA, FMP will send the user's credentials to FMS, and FMS will contact the domain controller. The DC sends the list of domain groups the user belongs to back to FMS and FMS looks in the FM file to see if there's a matching account set up. If there is match, the file will open and the user will have the priv set that was assigned to his group in filemaker.

Makes sense? Let me know if not and I'll expand on this a bit. See the tech brief PDFs on FileMaker's website for some screenshots of this.

HTH

Wim

[The Shadow]

Kevin,

As Wim states, it does work the way you imagined earlier. I just wanted to also point out that the user's account name via Get(AccountName) is also correct - its their username for the domain, the domain group is just used to determine the privilege set to use for that entire domain group.