File Stability

[Jim_Shelton]

Our solution is in FM8.5 running Server 8. We are upgrading the Server to 9 later this month. The computer running Server crashed hard and died last week.

 

Is there a utility to run the database through to check it out? Seems to run rough. We have about 20 users and the overall size is 4.6 GB.

 

Should I divide some of the tables into separate database files for the sake of size? Overall file size is growing at 250 MB per month at present rate.

 

I know we should be saving path on all our inserted pdf files, but when the Mac users do it that way the PC users cannot see the inserted images. Should I set up one box just for images on the network, that each workstation can see?

 

thanks,

 

Jim

[AHunter3]

a) Read this thread. And yes, you should set up a separate file server box for image hosting, one that all users can see. But this thread will tell you how to make it so that your Macs can see/open/etc files stored as reference by Windows users and vice versa.

 

b) Be that as it may, FmServer should not be unstable at 4.6 GB. Or at 46 GB, not that I've ever had a 46 gig file. Or at 460 GB either, for that matter, although have fun with your scheduled backups when you get to that size. Max file size is 8 Terabytes.

 

c) Are you using Server best practices? Dedicated stripped-down machine with no OS-level file sharing, no drive backups of the drive containing the live files except for FmServer's own scheduled backups, no antivirus, no indexing services, and no unnecessary services in general?

 

d) Have you always or are these files veterans of various treatments and mistreatments over the years, converted from older versions of FileMaker along the way? Have you ever Recovered the files and then used the Recovered files themselves as the live solution files?

[Jim_Shelton]

a) Okay I will do that.

 

b) Current backups are 8 minutes

 

c) There are some other programs on there, should I strip them completely out? Since they are not being used?

 

d) This is all new as of 8/1/07. Our old solution was in FM 6, but this was built new and the data brought in.

[AHunter3]

Programs that are simply installed on the FmServer box, but not being used, would not generally be causing a problem. SERVICES installed, which are RUNNING whether or not they are in use, would be a different story. You don't particularly want IIS or Terminal Services running, for example. But by and large the biggest offenders are the ones I listed, and any others that do extensive / perpetual reads and writes to/from disk, especially in a way that would necessitate trying to read from or copy the live open files.

 

Backups every 8 minutes seems like a lot / pretty often. Should not cause corruption in the files, even so.

 

 

The files that are being inserted into container fields: they aren't being copied to the FileMaker Server's hard disk first or anything, right? They're being inserted from a starting point of the end users' local hard drives?

[Jim_Shelton]

Correct they are being inserted by specific users. The files themselves are saved on a Mac which stores all graphic jobs.

 

Jim

[Jim_Shelton]

As for the backups, the server backsup every 6 hours and each backup takes 8 minutes. I did not mean backup every 8 minutes.

 

 

 

Jim

[AHunter3]

OK, that makes a lot more sense!

 

Your server box crashed the other day, you said. You rebooted and the solution has been feeling a bit wobbly ever since, even though it opened in FmServer w/o complaint? If that's the case, I would make a clone of your most recent pre-crash backup and then import all records into that clone. When a server crash corrupts a file, it's almost always the structure that suffers; the data in it is generally more robust.

[donwolfkonecny]

Hunter says no other applications, and no file read/writes. However...

 

1) one application I have running has to do with the UPS. It seems like this would be an exception, or is this still considered to cause problems. Then again, in OSX this software doesn't actually shut down the server, so I guess there is no advantage to it. It tells how many minutes remain in UPS. If I'm not around, this doesn't matter. If I am around, SOP would be to shut down the server. Does anyone know of a UPS software that can gracefully kicks out the users, closes the server, and then the machine like it used to in OS9?

 

2) How am I supposed to backup off the machine? If you think there shouldn't be any disk activity, how am I supposed to backup? I have schedules to back up to the same disk, but that is a local backup which is not sufficient. Shall I set the schedule to a LAN drive, it seems like not only does that involve disk activity, but also would leave a network drive attached from a machine that occasionally must be restarted (my desktop).

 

3) Almost everytime I modify a large field definition, when i close the box it loses network connection. When I restart the change has been made, but now and then I am finding corruption and this is one possible cause. After that, if I do changes to the field there won't be crash. But the first change will drop connection. I am accessing the server through FMP LAN, with no file sharing open on the server. 8.5 (I can't upgrade to 9 because it doesn't support 10.3)

[AHunter3]

Something is amiss.

 

I would consult a network guru and start with your network, as that's my first guess as to where your problem may lie, but that's just a hunch.

 

2) How am I supposed to backup off the machine? If you think there shouldn't be any disk activity, how am I supposed to backup? I have schedules to back up to the same disk

 

FileMaker doesn't make it painlessly easy to set up regularly scheduled backups to an external (or second internal) drive, do they?

 

I use a cron script to copy ONLY a single backup file that FmServer has made, and copy it to an external location. The "single backup file" is created once per week, as one of the many scheduled automated FmServer backups. My entire solution consists of a single file which makes this easier than if it were not.

 

I am in the process of experimenting to see if I can make a symbolic link to /Volumes/ExternalHD/LongTermBackups, as /Applications/FileMaker Server/LongTermBackups, and see if the latter can be fed to FmServer as a valid backup location. I will let you know.

 

Perhaps someone with better fortune as far as getting FmServer to reliably back up to an external (or 2nd internal or other-than-boot-or-fmServer-home) volume can help us both out here.

 

But no, you definitely don't want to be running Retrospect or other such automated backup software that is set up to back up the entire drive or volume — that's going to try to back up the live open served files, and that corrupts files about as quickly and bad as anything you can do.

 

 

You should not be getting closed out when you are modifying field defs. When you do, that usually means network. I do my work from a very long distance (FmServer is in Minneapolis, I am in New York). Although I try to avoid complex field def edits over a WAN like that, I can report that I hardly ever get disconnected, and the file from which I do is the one of the old system files (prev ver of solution from when it was multi-file) which I know to be corrupted. (I know that's not what you want to hear at this time. Sorry.)

[Jim_Shelton]

I actually did what you suggested on Friday evening. Brought all the data into a pre-crash backup. Seems less shaky, even though I feel the shakes came from me overcoming the crash and less the sysem.

 

Jim