Chaos of Operations - Shutdown Script

[mleering]

Hello all;

I'm trying to get a FileMaker Server (v11) that is hosted on a virtual instance of Win 2003 (Hyper-V) to gracefully close files etc. when the host machine is shut down.

I've read numerous articles stating that when Win 2003 shuts down, it should execute the shutdown script that is defined within the GPO, and then close the network connections, but I am finding that the opposite is true in this case.

Because of the fact that network connections are getting closed prior to my shutdown script executing, FileMaker clients are not being notified of the pending shutdown (and hence have no notice). Any un-committed changes that these users have are also obviously not being committed to the database either.

Has anybody else run into this kind of problem?

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to circumvent this?

Thanks in advance

Matt

[John May - Point In Space]

The only way to reliably shut down an FMS machine, either OS X or Windows, is to manually disconnect clients first via the FMS Admin tool, then close the databases, then perform the system shutdown. FileMaker Server tries to do this, but most of the time it takes longer than the OS' timeout for shutdown procedures before it shuts down.

- John

[Wim Decorte]

The big question is: why is the host being shut down? That should be a planned excercise giving you enough time to kick the users off and close the files.

It should be part of the host admin's shutdown procedure.

It can be automated by using VBscript and the fmsadmin command line but it should still be done prior to initiating the shutdown of the host.

[mleering]

Thanks for the quick response John.

While I understand that manual shutdowns are the safest bet, I'm sure you can agree with me that they might not always be possible (say in the event of a power-outage). In that kind of event, our UPS will kick-in, and we would hope that a shutdown script such as what we have defined would work. The one that I've defined performs the following tasks, and works like a charm when run manually:

- alert all connected clients of the pending shutdown

-wait 45 seconds

-disconnect all clients

-close all hosted files

-stop the FileMaker Database Server

The problem that I'm trying to alleviate is that Win 2003 is closing network connections prior to actually running our shutdown script. I can see this when I restart the server (on the blue screen with status updates that appears), and I've also tried logging each of the steps in my shutdown script to a .txt file. Even on the very first step of my script, we are being informed that the machine's local IP address is invalid.

I will heed your advice, and manually close files etc. when possible, but when it's not possible, I want to give a best effort attempt at gracefully closing the files down (even if the server were to give up on FileMaker's attempts to shutdown the files gracefully due to time constraints).

[Vaughan]

If this is a UPS shutdown then the UPS software should give the option to run a script. This should not be done as part of the computer shutdown process, it should be way before then.

When the UPS goes onto battery: wait a pre-determined time OR for a percentage of the battery capacity to be reached, then run the script to shut down FMS by disconnecting the clients, then closing the databases, then stopping FMS. Note that THIS CAN TAKE SOME TIME in the order of several minutes, particularly if the cache is large and the databases are used heavily. So allow up to 20 minutes or more to shutdown FMS and don't try to force the server itself to shutdown.

Note that disconnecting the clients isn't usually a big deal because in the event of power failure they've probably already gone off the air, or the network has gone down because the clients and network boxes often aren't on UPS themselves. So the server is left standing alone. (This also means that the databases may already have inconsistent data due to client-initiated processes being prematurely terminated.)

Once FMS is closed, only then think about downing the server. Often the boxes themselves are left running until exhaustion.