Maximum number of licensed users bug

[dcharrois]

Hi everyone. First off, let me say that I know all about the fact that running FM Server and Client on the same machine is claimed to be an unsupported configuration. But bear with me anyway.. I'm hoping that someone can shed light on the situtation.

We have a rather small database that sees infrequent usage (only some tens of accesses per day). But these accesses need to happen from one of two networked computers, and when they do happen they are fairly business critical.

Due to the small size of the network, it doesn't make economic sense to have a separate computer with FileMaker server running all day long. Likewise, since both computers are sometimes used for development, it isn't practical to share the database from one to the other with peer to peer networking, since FileMaker client on either machine is started and stopped throughout the day, which would make for an unreliable connection to say the least.

The solution should be (and has been in the past) to ignore FileMaker's warnings and run both FM Server and Client on the same machine. Obviously, I understand that directly opening the same database by the client as is being shared by the server is asking for trouble in the form of data corruption. But I can't see any reason why the computer can't make a TCP/IP connection to itself (127.0.0.1 or its real IP), and share the database from such a connection - after all, why should FileMaker Server (or client) care that the IP it's connecting to is itself - both should be able to treat the self-connection as though it's through a regular network. Every other server/client combination I've ever used has been able to do this, since from a programming point of view it looks identical to a "real" network connection, and it's almost as though FileMaker would have to go out of its way to disallow it.

In any case, we've been running our solution this way for several months and it's worked like a charm. But just a few days ago, the machine that's being both a client and a server has started to pop up the message "the maximum number of licensed users are currently using this copy of FileMaker Pro" and won't let us get further when we try to open a database off the network connection to itself. The second machine (not running the server) is able to access the databases just fine. The databases aren't getting corrupted or anything - we get this error message instead. And it doesn't happen every time - just about 75% of the time, and it never used to happen before at all.

We are running on Mac OS X for both machines, and have a licensed copy of FM Server, as well as two licensed copies of the client, running on the respective machines, so it shouldn't really be a license issue - it seems more of a bug. But then again, if we were to ask FileMaker about it, all they'd do is claim that running a server and client on the same machine is "unsupported". But if it really is unsupported (despite the fact that it used to work), I'd really like to know a technical reason why the client connecting to the server on the same machine via TCP/IP shouldn't work.

Thanks for any light someone might be able to shed on the situation.

Dan

[dcharrois]

I may have solved my own problem, though time will tell over the next few days to verify that the problem doesn't pop up again.

We only relatively recently migrated to FM7, and the databases were originally created in FM5, and have migrated through the years to later versions of FileMaker. Anyway, the new Define File References area turned out to have a lot of junk in it from old days - references to related databases from local files whose paths weren't even close to existing, and, perhaps more significantly, some network references to machines whose IPs are no longer accessible. Not having been able to view file references in the past, I hadn't realized all the junk that had accumulated over time.

So I removed the references and changed them to just have a single reference to fmnet:/192.168.2.100/ - and now, at least so far, everything seems to be working again (and faster, to boot). I still don't know why it would work some of the time before I removed the crud (or why the "properly" networked client machine didn't have any trouble), but at least so far it seems to be back.

Hopefully this solves it, but one question still remains - other than "because FileMaker tells you not to", does anyone have a good reason why we can't run the server and client on the same machine if the client doesn't access the same files directly but instead accesses them through the loopback interface, or the "real" IP of itself?

Dan