Filemaker on a small network

[oldmansteve]

Hi,

I’m new to the forum. :hello:

I expect this question will make you weep into your coffee cups but here goes.

I’m running a network of half a dozen PCs for a small and poor charity. We are running a five user version of Filemaker 5 (and that’s progress – until last year we were running a free version of Filemaker 2.1, from a magazine cover disc – ran on NetBios!). Anyway I’m having problems deciding the most efficient setup. The “ideal” computer is one that is running Windows XP Pro (a couple of the others are running Windows NT). It is “ideal” in that it’s the one most likely to be on all day (don’t want to have a PC switched on just to run Filemaker) and it has a tape backup device on it. It's sort of the hub for lots of data.

I would like to run Filemaker in a “guest” account so that anyone who comes in can start it up so that the host machine is where the database actually sits. Also at busy times anyone could use the machine for inputting data.

The “owner” of the machine runs in their own account for security when they are using the machine. However that means that they can’t then access the database from their account as it says maximum users already running on the machine. Any suggestions as to how I can sort this out?

I would add that there isn’t particularly heavy usage of the database.

Thanks

[Søren Dyhr]

I've immediately seen the "poor charity" flares waving, which kind of rules out a lot of contemporaty filemaker solutions. Whatever you do will the break even be elevated perhaps way beyond reason. Half a dozen is one too many for peer 2 peer sharing I'm afraid.

If you we're on mac's could you probably with the right skillset pull this off:

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/04/macpledge/index.php

However if you toss in "filemaker server 5" in amazon will you learn that it's anavailiabe...

But if you try with filemaker server on ebay will you land here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Brand-New-FileMaker-Server-8-Advanced-Upgrade_W0QQitemZ330156769398QQihZ014QQcategoryZ182QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD2VQQcmdZViewItem

...which could be of releavance if you have what it takes to change you solution into a IWP'ed one, what remains to be done is to upgrade the operating systems on the client machines to run firefox 2 on say Ubuntu linux. But beware development to IWP takes twice or trice as long as native filemaker development, further more do you need to poke into the html filemaker produces to weed the things firefox renders wrongly...

--sd

[David McQueen]

First, it sounds like you are running this on a peer to peer basis without FileMaker Server. I don't think that it supports two different accounts accessing the program from the same machine. If I remember correctly, even with server, FMP7 is where server and client on the same machine is supported. I could be wrong here.

Second, it sounds as if your machine requirements are not great and FMP5 runs on a lot of older platforms. You could pick up a machine to just run filemaker for a song on a peer to peer basis. It could be just about anything from Win 95 to Mac classic. Probably about a $30.00 investment, especially if you run it headless. Running headless would also lower the power requirements.

If you run it with a monitor, it could be the visitor's work station.

HTH

Dave McQueen