One such command “nc” lets you scan for listening daemons to check if a process is running on a specific port, without sending data.
#FILEMAKER SERVER 12 MANUAL MAC OS X#
In the Mac OS X environment you can use Unix commands to check running processes. (Here the usual caveat applies: test to make sure this works under your circumstances).
However, if you’re running FileMaker Server 11, you need to take advantage of some undocumented processes. released Server 12 on April 4, 2012, new options were added to start and stop processes now you can stop and start the WPE process via fmsadmin. Although FileMaker Server comes with a command line interface – fmsadmin – there is no documented process to manage the WPE in FileMaker Server 11. To fully automate the process I used one set of tools to check the state of the WPE, and another to automatically switch on the WPE if it wasn’t running.
#FILEMAKER SERVER 12 MANUAL MANUAL#
However, when setting this up, I ran into issues with PHP sendmail failures, and I wanted a process that minimized manual intervention. If the ping returns an error, the administrator intervenes. If the ping – a PHP request – returns a valid result, then all is well. One oft-used method is to create a PHP page that pings the Database Server. In order to automate the process we need to turn to some system-based tools. However, as it is a GUI-based system, it needs eyes-on management.
The Admin Console is a GUI-based tool to manage databases, backup and script schedules, clients, statistics, and the current state of the database and WPE processes. The ability to build an automatic monitoring method becomes critical for anyone managing web pages that communicate with FileMaker Server, to rapidly identify problems and minimize downtime. But what happens when a web page is no longer is responsive? Which process failed? Is it a page error, a Database Server problem, or an issue with the WPE? As you can imagine, manually checking the state of the server becomes tedious. Custom web publishing such as PHP communicates to the Database Server via the WPE. The Database Server is perhaps the most obvious component, as this hosts the databases that are shared with clients.Īny type of web publishing requires the Web Publishing Engine (WPE) to be active and running. FileMaker Server 11 includes several components to publish databases to client machines.