MAC FM Server 12 Web Publishing Engine Shuts Down

[jsorge]

Hey all,

I'm running a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard and FileMaker Server 12, with clients connecting both via the FileMaker network and through PHP on the web. I keep having errors where the web publishing engine shuts down and won't start back up. Does anyone have an idea of where to look to fix this problem? Thanks!

jared

[Wim Decorte]

The log files. Especially for any errors on trying to start it back up again. Whatever errors are logged there will likely lead to some good info.

[WatashiWaRyuzakiDesu]

Hello dear Worldwide FileMaker Community,

 

it seems that we are currently encountering a severe problem similar to the one mentioned above. WPE shuts down, freezes or dies for no apparent reason. These unforeseen crashes happen once or several times a day. However, we can bring WPE back to live by using the RESTART option of the command line tool fmsadmin. Roaming the log files (/var/log/system.log as well as FileMaker Servers logs) and the internet boards did not give us any clue as to what keeps causing these constant crashes.

 

We are running Mac OS X Snow Leopard on an xserve intel architecture and use FileMaker Server 12 (Version 12.0.3.327 with latest patches installed). We have already increased the cache size for the database engine and our server is far from reaching its limits concerning available disk space, amount of simultaneous client connections etc.

 

Can anyone please help us to figure out what we are missing in order to set up a stable FileMaker Server 12 environment to be used with custom web publishing?

 

Thank you for your attention.

[Justin Close]

Watashi (and everyone else reading this),

    I believe that it is highly likely that you have a bad license key from FileMaker for your server install.  If your server key was generated before 2012.05.11  (May 11, 2012) it is of the bad variety.  (Note this is not when it was INSTALLED, but when FileMaker generated the key.)  Here is a page that describes the key problem:  http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/299/~/error-message%3A-802-error-is-displayed-%28unable-to-open-file-%29-with-filemaker

 

     We recently fixed our issues with these problems with a new key from FMI (they should give you a new one for free).  We had problems because we were trying to use IWP to serve some web based users, and also had a couple of CWP connections going on in the background:  one was a plugin.  Also, if you use PHP for anything, that is CWP. 

     We didn't get crashes or completely stoppages of CWP, but we would get an error that 'the Database was unavailable'.  If you kept trying it would eventually work again. 

 

--  Justin

[WatashiWaRyuzakiDesu]

Thank you, Justin, for sharing your idea about the bad license key. Who would have dared to imagine that a thing like »a bad license key« could even exist?

 

I checked on our key but since we obtained it last autumn it should be alright.

 

However, we have now stocked up on memory and upgraded our server hardware from 12 GB to 48 GB (yes, I am speaking about RAM, not hard disk space). I hope that this will help FileMaker to run in a more stable mode.