My Sever disappears sometimes why is that?

[kudodorf]

2 of my servers disappears from the local hosts sometimes and I don't know why this happens. Usually when I go to Open host I can see my 4 servers on local host but then after a while some how it disappears and I cant see them. If i specify host I can find the server and get into my files but it still doesn't show up on local host. The 2 server using windows nt doesn't disappear but the other 2 using windows server 2000 comes and goes from the local host. does anyone know why this happens and how i can fix this so that all my servers show up on local host. thanks in advance.

[kudodorf]

Oh yeah. whenever i restart the 2 servers they would appear for a while and then later it would go away again.

[pault2004]

I am having this exact problem at my company. Amazingly it is almost the entirely same situation as you, Kudodorf.

I wish I had a solution, but as of yet, we haven't found one.

[Will]

Kudodorf -

Are the NT and Windows 2000 Servers on the same subnet?

[kudodorf]

im on the same subnet and on windows server 2k.

I really cant seem to fix this problem. Its been working fine for months alrdy. It just recently started disappearing from the local host and I have no clue why this happens. Sometimes restarting the service brings it back up for a while and these past few days it brings it back up for a good few minutes and then it goes away again. I cant see the servers or the files. It worked fine for several months and then all of a sudden this happens.

[Will]

Just to make sure I understand - You have 2 NT servers and 2 Windows 2000 servers - are all four servers on the same subnet?

[kudodorf]

yeah they are all on the same subnet.

[Will]

It seems like something changed on your network unless you made some change to both Windows 2000 Servers such as a applying a patch. But if it were the network then why aren't the NT servers affected??? Did anyone make changes to your network devices (switches etc.)?

[kudodorf]

No changes were made to any of the servers. No patchs were applied either. Nothing was touched. it just happened out of no where.

[bradm98]

Are all of the clients NT-based machines? I vaguely remember something along these lines occurring with Win98 clients attached to a Win2K Server. I can't remember the specific cause or solution, but maybe this will jog someone else's memory...

[kudodorf]

The clients arent all NT based. They use 98, xp, and nt.

[Scott Pon]

I am having the same problem described in this thread. Let me tell you what I'm doing too:

1 FM Server on a Windows 2k Server. (This is my Database Server)

The FM Server is Version 5

My clients are a mix of Win98, Win2k.

The clients are all running FM 5 Pro. I got 90% of them running v5.3, but some that slipped through are at v5.1

This only happened once in like 2 years, until last friday it did it, and now this friday it did it again. There has not been any changes to the Database server.

I end up having to specify a host and typing the IP address. then connecting from there.

This is very annoying since I have to kick everyone off the service and then restart the service on the server. Then it goes back to normal. If anyone has seen a thread or know an answer by all means help me out!

Thanks!

[Scott Pon]

hmm no responses... no one knows?

Here's a guess and someone please tell me if its a possibiltiy or if i'm hallucinating:

My files being hosted are getting pretty big. They have alot of records in them. Do you think it's possible that the files are just getting too big? And it's overloading the system and crashing the service. Is that a possiblity?

[spb]

I'm having the same problem and have been watching this thread to see if something comes up. How big are your files. Mine total up to about half a gig, with 50,000 records in the most populated file (the others average around 10,000 to 20,000 records, fifty files in all). I'm running Win2000 Server, with FM 5.5 Server running as a service. Nothing else runs on that box.

I've noticed that when my files vanish, I can log directly into the server and see everything apparently working normally. FM 5.5 thinks it is still serving the files. Only a reboot seems to fix the problem. I do know that RAM usage is not the issue. During a cache flush after heavy usage, RAM usage spikes up to a max of 47%. If it was over 90%, I'd be worried about it.

I've been scrutinizing my event logs, trying to figure out what triggers the problem. One thing that happened recently is that I had 73 files being served. I thought I'd pull off and archive about 20 that didn't really need to be there, hoping to lighten the load. I did this and left myself a trap.

I have my FM files set up to do a few hours of processing in the middle of the night. A master updater script performs a set of about thirty external scripts, opening files and running updates one after another. My trap was that a couple of my files had calc fields on the default layout that referred to now-archived old files. So I'd come in, find an error halt about not finding the file (I'm doing this in a Win2000 client machine running FM 6). It gives me a nav window. To get the processing done, I direct FM through the nav window to where the old files are now archived. The processing picks up and finishes.

This happened two days in a row (before I'd found and killed all those old calc fields). Both times, right after pointing FM to the archived files, after processing finished, the hosts vanished. This morning, after processing normally without needing redirection, no host vanishing.

The problem here is that this may have something to do with it, but it isn't all there is. I've had host vanishings happen three times in the middle of the afternoon without anything like the above happening at all.

Steve Brown

[Wim Decorte]

It's a hard problem to troubleshoot but almost always it has to do with the network (cables, routers, switches).

Here's what going on: the FMS service sits there, listening on port 5003 for anyone who wants to connect.

A client that tries to connect scans the whole if its own subnet on port 5003 to see if any FMS's are listening. That scanning takes a while so there is timeout built in. If no FMS answers before the timeout the host dialog box stays empty. If you specify the IP address then that scanning does not happen, FMP looks directly at port 5003 of the IP address you specified.

Anything between the client and the server that introduces delay can cause what your're seeing. Like a bad cable that causes packets error & packet resends, a switch or router that tries to figure out at what speed to work (10 or 1000, 1000 - better to configure the switch to operate at one speed only) it can even be a bad network card in a machine somehwere or generally too much traffic on the network...

Since it is related to the network and intermittent, these things are a bear to find ...