I have a client who wants to know if they can place our program, done in FM55, onto an OSX server and then have it accessed by workstations using OS9. They are aware that they will need FMP Server, but they want reassurance that this configuration will work before making the purchase.

Will this work? Any 'gotchas'?

Thanks for your help.

Filemaker connecting to Filemaker Server makes no distinctions as to OS choice. Filemaker itself does not know the difference. Now of course OS X is still a new and relatively untested OS platform and thus you might experience some issues with that, but so far it seems to work pretty well for most folks. Critical item: MAKE SURE TO FOLLOW THE BEST PRACTICES DOCUMENTATION ON FILEMAKER SERVER, which you can get from the Filemaker, Inc website. Highlights include turning file sharing OFF, and making sure that Filemaker Server is the only application or server running on that machine. To do otherwise is an invitation for problems, regardless of the OS.

There are too many deamons on OS X Server.

To run properly FM server on it you might need to kill most of them hence you'll end up with running OS X (not OS X Server)

Dj

You do not need to run FM Server on a Server machine - irrespective of whether the Server machine is running X or 9.

I have an old 7500 PowerMac running 9.2.2 as my FileMaker Server platform and it works fine. The whole Mac crashes every now and again, but a restart sorts everything out. I will be moving to X shortly though, as this system is ideal for Macs that should just stay on the whole time. As a client - i.e. work Mac - X has it's pitfalls at the moment, but they have nothing to do with the Unix underpinnings.

I expect FMPro Server on an X client system to simply improve on the stability of my 7500 running 9.2.2