mac Disappearing Administrator Groups

[Richard Fincher]

HI.  I seem to have an ongoing problem with Administrator Groups disappearing from my Filemaker Server 13 control panel.  I'm using 13.0.4.400

 

Anyone else had this?

[Wim Decorte]

do they show up again after an admin server restart?

Anything in the logs?

 

What else is running on the machine, any external backups, snapshots/restores,...

[Richard Fincher]

I've added them back in again now, so I'll need to wait until they disappear again to see if an admin console restart brings them back.

I couldn't find anything suspicious in the logs, but my logs seem only to go back to September 5th - is this something which can be changed? I normally like to keep logs for at least a year.

Ages ago, I used Time Machine on this server, but stopped on advice from this forum. I now use the default daily backup schedule within Filemaker Server itself, which occasionally gets rsynced offsite (one way rsync of the copies, not the live files)

The other programs being run are "S.M.A.R.T. Monitor" (to check the RAID), and Parallels Desktop (which runs FileMaker Pro 11 in a VM)

[Richard Fincher]

OK, I found logs going back to May, just not visible in the web control panel.

There's a "terminated abnormally" in June, but it's been working fine for quite a while after that.

Do you know where the admin groups data is stored? Is it a text file, or .db file or something like that?

[Richard Fincher]

Just rebooted the server, and they disappeared again.

[Wim Decorte]

These settings are stored in a plist in the FMS folders.  Are you sure there is nothing running on the machine that would revert back to a previous state?

 

Shut down FMS and do a full permissions repair first before doing anything else.

[Richard Fincher]

I figured they might be, so I had a good look for it, but only found one plist file, and that wasn't it. Now I know it's there, I'll look harder. Permissions repair sounds like a good idea, but I'd feel cleverer if I found the actual file and repaired it specifically! I did wonder if I'm shutting down FMS properly, I closed all the fmp12 files, and flicked all the blue on/off switches to off, before restarting.

Is it possible that it mostly stores them in RAM and only writes them to disk during a shutdown?

It's a software RAID hard-disk set, not sure if that's relevant?

[Richard Fincher]

Pretty sure there's no such file, which makes me wonder if FMS is trying to create the aforementioned plist file, but is unable to due to directory permissions ......

[IdealData]

Uninstall and reinstall?

[Wim Decorte]

Not a plist, it's the "server_config.xml" file in the FMS admin/conf/ folder

 

Not a good idea to try and set permissions for just that file, there may be dependencies trickling in from somewhere else so a full system repair is a better idea.

[Richard Fincher]

OK, found those, but they dont seem to be xml files, at least if they are, the compressed and/or encrypted, or maybe corrupted

Filemaker-Server:conf root# ls -l

total 96

-rw-r--r-- 1 fmserver fmsadmin 762 Jul 9 21:43 deployment.xml

-rw-r--r-- 1 fmserver fmsadmin 748 Apr 20 13:56 log4j.properties

-rw-r--r-- 1 fmserver fmsadmin 720 Jul 9 21:43 managerconfig.xml

-rw-r--r-- 1 fmserver fmsadmin 28224 Sep 21 00:57 server_config.xml

-rw-r--r-- 1 fmserver fmsadmin 564 Jul 9 21:43 wpe_workerconfig.xml

-rw-r--r-- 1 fmserver fmsadmin 292 Jul 9 21:43 ws_workerconfig.xml

Permissions don't seem to be at fault, AFAICT.

Haven't taken any action yet, as am still studying the problem. Would like to understand what caused this ideally. An uninstall/reinstall may fix the problem, but it's a bit drastic, would have to be done after midnight and i wouldnt learn anything in the process.

I think part of the problem is I only have one Filemaker Server (so far). When i have trouble with other server software installs (eg Plesk, Proxmox etc...) i usually compare files between working and non-working servers.

[Wim Decorte]

Those XML files are encrypted

[Richard Fincher]

OK, I guess I can understand why they did that, as it's proprietary software.  I suppose the encryption keys are known only to Filemaker Inc and buried in the binary executable(s), in order to stop people like me fiddling around with the xml files?

 

The fact that the last mod date of the file is very recent, would seem to suggest that it's at least trying to write the Administrator Groups to the file.  Does kind of dead-end my investigation though.  

[Wim Decorte]

after you set up the admin group, can you actually use it?

 

If you can, then I would look very hard at what changes the config of your machine overnight.

[Richard Fincher]

Yes, the admin groups work fine immediately they are created.  They don't disappear overnight as such, just when I do a reboot of the server (e.g. after Mac OS X Software Update requires it pending a security patch).  Although rebooting for no specific reason also causes them to disappear.  Reminds me of how PIX firewalls behave where everything is stored in RAM and won't survive a reboot unless you do "write mem"