KeyFreeze

[carlosnorvik]

Hello Everybody:

I just had an "incident" that took all morning to fix.

Yesterday I restarted the server, for some reason the router did not assign the reserved address and I did not notice. Came late to the office this morning to a "Filemaker is not working" (Everybody has an opener file with buttons that poitn to the reserved IP to open the files). Everybody except one, unfortunately! She was able to open the files and without any server knowledege decided to "help"  and simply closed the Admin Console and tried to reopen it (without knowing the user name of password).

Nothing really worked afterwards, I could not even close the server from the command line interface. No choice but to stop the service (hoping it would work fine when re-started), turn off the computer, restart, close and discard the databases and upload from the latest backup. So far it is working OK.

Lesson learned, verbal instructions of "don't touch" are easily forgotten or disregarded, so I installed KeyFreeze on the server, and of course I am not informing anybody that it is installed or how to disable it.

[webko]

And when you are not available / leave / get hit by a bus?

The Server should be set up for Administrators to have access, and no one else. But locking it down like that leaves a single point of failure that would be difficult to resolve under some circumstances...

Cheers

Webko

[Josh Ormond]

In addition, it would be wise to set up the router to assign the server the same IP address. Typically reserving that IP address for only the server prevents issues like this.

[carlosnorvik]

Hi Josh:

The router was set up to assign 192.168.1.5 to the server, I have no clue why it didn't. I even double checked to see that the MAC address had no errors.

I reset the router and then it did what it was supossed to do (assign the correct IP).

Carlos

[carlosnorvik]

Hi Webco:

We are a small company, I am the only one who touches the server and it is inside my office. (I am the "self appointed" administrator :-) ), unfortunately somebody had a bright idea today.

Very few people use Filemaker in El Salvador. Actually, among my clients and friends, none use it. If I ever find another user the first thing I would do is to exchange cards with him, so we can help each other out in an emergency and or absence. Most small guys are stuck with spreadsheets, while the midsize and big ones use some flavor of SQL or SAP (expensive but very popular, even among some small and many mid sized companies, SAP has have done a great marketing job).

When I am not available, we have many recent backups both online and onsite (2 USB's on the server plus the server HDD) to set up an emergency  network sharing from any FM Pro client. The chance of the 3 failing at the same time is small and if it happens, there is the online backup).

If I get hit by a bus or shot by a bullet,  tough luck. Fortnately the chances of both things happening at once are slim (failure of server + getting hit by a bus or bullet).

Leave (you mean quit), not soon, it is my own business.

Chances of failure: There is always at least one too many, that is why I try to have more backups than needed (not only for FM, for everyhing else also).