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Automatic startup of FileMaker Pro Server
Authored by: JeffTronics on Aug 31, '04 03:53:31PM

Hi,

I want to thank everyone who put this post together because it became a valuable source of information for me. I recently upgraded an OS 9 G4 to Jaguar 10.2.8, and was stunned to find that FileMaker Server 5.5 does not Auto-start the server. I was also amazed that FileMaker Inc created a Tech Info document (referenced in this thread), with misleading steps. Specifically, they begin their steps having you create the FileMakerServer directory in the /System/Library/StartupItems, while the two files that belong in that directory, FileMakerServer and StartupParameters.plist, are in /Library/StartupItems. This was greatly confusing to me when comparing the steps posted here and at FileMaker's site. It didn't take me long to compare the two before realizing their steps won't solve the issue unless they make a correction in their technote.

Realizing this problem has been around for sometime now, I don't hold much confidence FileMaker Inc will come out with a fix, but rather continue it's future development with later server versions that don't have this problem. The trouble is I'm a little strapped for cash right now to shell out a thousand bucks for a bug fix! I'm certain they can spend half that on development, testing, and post a fix.

Unfortunately for me, regardless of what I tried, the steps did not work for me. This made me crazy, but realized after trying them over and over for hours, I would have to advise the user of this machine to click the Start Server button after any restart. Fortunately that will be infrequent because the machine is rebooted once a month.

For those of you more interested, the problem I was having, was the startup script was saying the path to the config file was incorrect. However it was not. To keep things simple, I tried configuring the script to locate the FileMaker Server 5.5 folder at the root, and or in Applications. Sometimes I would get the Starting FileMaker Server at boot, but it was too unpredictable. After the reboot I would verify it was truly running by checking the Process viewer and using ‘top' in Terminal. It was not.

In addition to the resources I found here, there are other helpful places on the web that offer the same steps with a twist, that include using other utilities too. However I was able to find a couple of USENET posts that too had no success even though they went through these steps. One thing is clear, there's nothing specific about what operating system everyone is having success with. Again, this machine was updated to Jaguar, while it appears problems are not reported with 10.1 or Panther – go figure.

Here are the links outside this post:

4) http://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=29&showtopic=2228

5) http://www.afp548.com/articles/system/fmpserver.html

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=8ba4ce9c.0303081231.7370b05c%40posting.google.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DFileMaker%2520Server%25205.5%2520AutoStart%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN%26tab%3Dwg

Again, thank you all for this brilliant and outgoing solution. I value this is a community of users helping users. Too bad FileMaker couldn't have take the energy equal to this and posted a downloadable solution.

Best,

JeffTronics.



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