FileMaker Server rebuilds are fun!

Tuesday 27th August, 2013

Due to prolonged contract re-negotiations with a FileMaker client, I’ve been offsite for about 3 months. In that time, FileMaker has pretty much behaved, without any intervention. Which is pretty good going. Backups went without a hitch, and work was done.

There were a couple of problems: the solution stopped emailing, and access to some legacy (pre v12) SuperContainer documents had gone awol.

As you no doubt have figured out, both of these were environmental issues, not FileMaker per se. The IT team had re-assigned the SMTP server a new ip address (or it had died, more likely), and mercy me, if a Java/MS Security patch hadn’t futzed the java installation on the box itself.

The box is running Win Server 2008 R2. So I try to console in and see what the state of play is. No joy. So ‘RDC is your friend,’ and there I am trying to get the command line fmsadmin to do its stuff. It does respond, but its responses do not fill me with confidence. Server restart, no improvement. Meanwhile, throughout, and despite, my poking around in the poor things innards, FMS is still merrily serving clients.

The upshot: a full uninstall, re-install, and everything is tickety boo. Total downtime, about 30 minutes, give or take.

The point is, despite running a fritzed installation, FMS was still just doing its thing. Quite remarkable.