I'm having a weird problem. I'm having issues with our server crashing. For some reason, 2 or more times a week, I come in to the office and the filemaker server is not responding. The actual network server works fine, and the fm server appears to be working correctly, but if I run the launcher file to access the files in the fm server, the computer is not able to reach them, and even when I manually go to the "open remote" feature, the server does not show. The only way to access the files is to manually stop the server and re start it again. The event log does not show anything unusual. Anyone have any idea of what could be wrong?

That doesn't mean that filemaker server has crashed. Is there any indication of a crash in the event logs?

It sounds like you're running other things on that machine besides filemaker server. That makes it a lot harder to troubleshoot.

Generally these kind of problems are caused by network problems. But you say they only happen at night. Is there some kind of backup process going on the machine while filemaker server still has the files open? Do you get any 'files was closed improperly' when you open the files?

This actually sounds like it might be an occurrence of the "disppearing host" problem described in the "It Happened Again: Lost Host on Network" discussion. Some possible solutions are mentioned in that discussion. What version of FileMaker Server are you running, what version of Windows Server operating system are you using and what version of the FMP client software are your clients using?

Hi, Caro. I've seen this happen on servers when a SQL dump occurs in another program. FM Server is still running, but "asleep"-- none of the files are available across the network. I know you said the event log does not show anything unusual, but does that pertain to only FM? Or does it show unusual things for other apps?

HTH,

Jerry