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12 posts tagged with "filemaker server"

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· 2 min read
Angelo Luchi

Ottomatic announces support for Claris Server

Ottomatic is pleased to announce official support for Claris Server.

Deploy a Claris Server on Ottomatic now! Please review our plans for more information.

Claris Server opens the door to the entire Claris platform, including Studio and Connect. Once FileMaker Pro solutions are converted to Claris Pro and hosted on Claris Servers, developers can leverage the power of Studio with Pro and vice versa. Note that FileMaker custom apps will need to be converted to Claris Pro--- Claris Server works with files using the .claris extensions only. Under the hood there is no file format change, so your solutions should work the same way, with a few caveats.

With Claris Server, there are some important points to remember:

  1. Claris server has support for Linux OS only, so solutions may need to be updated if they are dependent on operating system-specific functions and file paths, such as with server-side exports or file manipulations.
  2. Authentication is via Claris ID accounts only, for now. Local file authentication, OAuth, and Directory Services are not yet supported.
  3. Claris Server as an ODBC Source is not supported.
  4. The legacy FileMaker Server PHP API isn’t supported.
  5. Accounts script steps are no longer supported.
  6. The following extended privileges are no longer supported: fmxdbc, fmreauthenticate, fmphp.
  7. Secondary Machines (WebDirect Workers) are not supported.
  8. Open Apps via URL using: claris:// rather than fmp://.

Also, Otto by Proof+Geist won't be able to do migrations until there is a Data Migration Tool for .claris files. We expect that very soon, but it is not ready just yet.

Get started here!

· One min read
Angelo Luchi

Ottomatic data centers partner with Wasabi and Backblaze

Did we mention that our data center partners have a strategic partnership with Wasabi and Backblaze?

If you are on Ottomatic, you have direct high-speed connectivity to both storage services with no added egress fees, which means your backups and access to external FileMaker Container storage will be faster, safer, and more cost-effective than using comparative storage services.

For more information, please contact us.

· 5 min read
Angelo Luchi

Providing the Best FileMaker Hosting

What makes a hosting company the best?

A lot can go into providing hosting, especially niche hosting like FileMaker or Claris. Special monitoring tools and experience in the platform are needed to understand the finer nuances of how it should or shouldn't perform.

Different types of hosting

Let's talk about the differences in Managed and Unmanaged Hosting and who's responsible for what.

Managed Hosting is a type of hosting service where a hosting provider or CSP handles the setup, administration, management, and support of a Cloud Instance. Management services vary from provider to provider but typically include OS updates and patching, 24/7/365 support, network infrastructure and hardware management, basic security measures, monitoring, and remediation for the server.

Unmanaged Hosting is a do-it-yourself experience. You get a server with the OS of your choice, and the provider is responsible for operating the equipment and maintaining the physical environment in which the servers are kept. You are responsible for administering the server remotely, and that includes responsibility of software upgrades, patching, security, and monitoring.

Which is Ottomatic Cloud Hosting considered

Ottomatic is a Managed Cloud Service Provider for FileMaker and Claris, as well as Infrastructure as a Service. We've chosen to offer managed services to keep a high level of excellence in our Cloud Hosting Environment. We patch our systems weekly, manage backups, monitor 15,000 data points every 30 seconds, and offer you our many years of experience to maintain and support your environment.

Here are some other benefits of Managed Hosting:

Reduced Risk

In today’s digital enterprise, reducing risk is not just the job of one department. In many ways, it’s the responsibility of everyone in the organization, from the employee choosing not to open a suspicious email, to the accountant ensuring financial information is shared securely.

The thing is, people aren’t always perfect, and effectively reducing exposure to online risks is not an easy task. It takes a high level of oversight and constant maintenance on the back end to ensure:

  • the OS is updated, and security patches are completed,
  • cybersecurity threats are being identified and remediated
  • good traffic is able to flow in while suspicious traffic is stopped at the gate.

Outsourcing this part of the job to a managed Cloud Service Provider is a great way to ensure it gets done correctly and consistently.

Keep Up with the Speed of Business

Business growth isn’t always linear. Sometimes scale happens rapidly, or can even come in waves with seasonal changes and market shifts.

Managed Cloud Service Providers work with you to adjust your cloud resources as needed to ensure your IT scales with your business. More importantly, as long as you maintain good communication with your Cloud Service Provider team, they can help you create a technology roadmap to support upcoming growth and product launches.

Stay Up to Date with Technology

Moore’s Law means that tech is getting better, faster, and more compact at an exponential rate. Not all companies will keep up with these changes, which means many will miss out on the efficiency and customer service benefits of emerging tech like IoT and machine learning / AI.

Working with a good managed hosting provider means you get access to the latest technology, without having to invest a lot of capital in it. And as advancements happen, your company will benefit from them, while your competitors struggle to catch up.

Stay Compliant

Companies that manage sensitive or highly regulated data, such as information covered by HIPAA or PCI regulations, have a slew of compliance requirements they have to meet on an ongoing basis — requirements that take time and attention to fulfill. Your managed Cloud Service Provider will take care of these tasks for you, freeing up time and headspace for you to focus on other things.

Hidden Costs of Unmanaged Hosting

At first glance, you might think, “I can get unmanaged hosting for just a few dollars a month. How can you say managed is a better deal?”

It’s important to look below the surface to account for the hidden costs of unmanaged hosting, including:

Patching and Updates

Who is handling the patching and updates? Account for the time it will take them to stay on top of that responsibility, as well as server reboot time. Keep in mind that 5,000 to 6,000 new vulnerabilities surface each year, or an average of 15 per day. And patching doesn’t just involve clicking a button — your team will have to test and verify each patch to ensure the patch is good and that it has been applied to all of the company’s systems without breaking any functionality.

Productivity

Beyond the time spent patching or responding to downtime and other types of support, it’s important to account for how those tasks will affect your team’s productivity levels. Every time one of your team members gets interrupted, it can take around 23 minutes for them to refocus on their prior task.

Downtime

Using managed hosting significantly reduces the chance you’ll experience server or application downtime.

Management

In unmanaged hosting, you are ultimately responsible for all aspects of the server. This can be daunting, especially if you don't have a background in IT or a solid understanding of networking and OS environments.

Conclusion

In the end, with a managed Cloud Service Provider like Ottomatic, you have peace of mind that lets you focus on what you do best - running your business!

Please contact us for more information about our services.

· 2 min read
Angelo Luchi

Protecting Your Server with Ottomatic's Native DDoS Mitigation System

What is a DDoS Protection System

A DDoS system works by dynamically routing traffic from an instance when an attack is detected. Attack detection is fully automated based on proprietary detection algorithms filtering attack traffic while clean traffic can reach the servers.

How Can Ottomatic Help?

Ottomatic's native DDoS mitigation system adds an extra layer of protection to keep our hosting infrastructure online and operating even when it is the target of attacks. We can secure our instances from DDoS attacks in minutes with automatic DDoS mitigation services, which are available in all our worldwide locations. The system monitors network traffic and routes malicious activity to the Attack Mitigation Farm (AMF) after a DDoS event is detected, generally within 60 seconds.

Ottomatic's native DDoS mitigation system protects our instances without increased latency or routing our traffic to a third party. DDoS protection adds 10Gbps of mitigation capacity per instance and safeguards all attached IPv4 addresses. We are currently working on bringing this up to 25Gbps.

Mitigation

When a DDoS attack is detected, incoming traffic is re-routed to our Attack Mitigation Farm which filters traffic based on specific attributes of the current attack. Clean traffic is tunneled directly to the server in the same data center, ensuring that no packets ever leave our premium low-latency network as one might typically encounter with a 3rd party DDoS mitigation service provider.

Coverage

The DDoS protection works against Layer 3 and Layer 4 attacks, protecting against both TCP and UDP attacks. This coverage is available in all worldwide locations.

DDoS mitigation is only performed for our IP addresses. Additionally, Ottomatic's general IP space is eligible for automated temporary null-route protection if an attack exceeds specific heuristics.

Interested in Learning More?

AtProof+Geist, we know that the Claris Platform is a key puzzle piece to any business ecosystem. With our world-class hosting platform, professional development tools, and expertise in both Claris FileMaker and web technologies, we are ready to innovate and help support your business. For questions, comments, or more information, drop us a line at info@proofgeist.com.

· One min read
Angelo Luchi

More Than Monitoring: Ottomatic's Self-Healing Capbilities

Ottomatic has become a preferred DevOps Claris FileMaker Hosting Platform for multiple businesses, non-profits, partners, SBAs, and schools. With our low-latency data center locations, world-class support, and variety of managed services, we can help you deploy, manage, and safely watch over your data!

In addition, we've built in some pretty amazing internal DevOps tools to help keep your FileMaker system running smoothly. We monitor all of FileMaker's processes for memory leaks, failures, outages, and performance-hindering utilization (runaway scripts) so we can "Ottomatically" heal them. In fact, we monitor almost 15,000 data points, every 30 seconds of every instance we manage!

All this, plus Otto, are included with every Ottomatic subscription. Test us out for 7 days and see for yourself.

Proof+Geist: Supporting Your FileMaker Ecosystem

At Proof+Geist, we know that the Claris platform is a key puzzle piece to any business ecosystem. With our world-class hosting platform, professional development tools, and expertise in both Claris FileMaker and web technologies, we are ready to innovate and help support your business. For questions, comments, or more information, drop us a line at info@proofgeist.com.

· One min read
Angelo Luchi

Ottomatic has expanded its Asia-Pacific footprint to encompass the Indian Subcontinent! We are proud to announce 3 new data center locations for FileMaker Cloud Hosting and General Infrastructure deployments: Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi NCR.

The new regions present an opportunity to take advantage of the big data and infrastructure services onshore while staying compliant with India's data laws and regulations.

The 3 new data centers mark Ottomatic’s 25th, 26th, and 27th global locations and is yet another indicator of progress on our mission to support the new Modern FileMaker Revolution.

Today, for Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi you can select our FileMaker Cloud instances powered by 3rd Generation AMD EPYC™ processors, or our Intel Xeon Cloud Instances.

For more information, please contact us or sign up here.

· 3 min read
Angelo Luchi

FileMaker Hosting in the Cloud Powered by Otto

With their powers combined: Otto & Ottomatic deliver exceptional Claris FileMaker hosting

Ottomatic, our performance-based Claris FileMaker Cloud hosting platform, includes access to Otto!

Every cloud instance we deploy for the FileMaker Community will now take advantage of Otto at no additional licensing costs. If you deploy a development instance and a production instance with Ottomatic, you can save $400 per year in Otto licenses. Already purchased an On-Prem license of Otto for your own deployments? We offer a credit when you move your hosting and license over to Ottomatic.

Contact us for more information.

About Otto

Otto is a FileMaker developer's dream. It packs some powerful features, including automated file and data migrations, scheduled deployments, and easy access to live files and backups. It's an excellent DevOps tool that expands the reach for developers: receiving webhooks, custom and unified application logging, and Google Groups authentication. Plus, it supports Linux (also supported by Ottomatic).

We chose to bundle Otto with Ottomatic because we think the Otto is a requirement for all FileMaker deployments. We strongly believe that FileMaker thrives when we Imagine pushing from dev to prod with a few clicks. You'll be able to download backups in a quick and simple way. Otto makes every part of a professional Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) easier.

Learn more about the current version of Otto.

About Ottomatic

Proof+Geist is proud to offer a cloud service focusing on speed, optimization, and security. We have 26 data centers worldwide and a network built on low latency global peers.

Ottomatic is supported by high-performance processors and NVMe disk sub-systems, contributing to a better overall performance with FileMaker Server. Other hosting providers might offer you metered instances, but Ottomatic removes those limitations. This means you get more performance per dollar than others that meter your CPU, Disk, and Traffic.

Get started today all around the globe

Ottomatic is available in 26 locations across five continents, ready to host your FileMaker solutions:

  • North America: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Miami, New York, Seattle, San Jose, Toronto
  • South America: São Paulo
  • Europe: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Warsaw
  • Asia: Bangalore, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo
  • Australia: Melbourne, Sydney

At Proof+Geist, we know that the Claris platform is a key puzzle piece to any business tech ecosystem. And having a sturdy cloud hosting platform is a must-have in a world where innovation is constantly happening in the cloud. That's why we created Ottomatic, a worldwide, low latency hosting platform crafted to make your FileMaker apps soar.

With our world-class hosting platform, professional development tools, and expertise in both Claris FileMaker and web technologies, Proof+Geist is ready to innovate and help support your business.

Learn more about the Modern FileMaker Revolution.

· 3 min read
Angelo Luchi

FileMaker WebDirect Timeout Error

Many of our clients use FileMaker WebDirect to give users access to their FileMaker apps via browser. In the recent days of Claris's FileMaker Server 19.5.1 and 19.5.2 (specifically on Ubuntu 20.04 / Nginx) releases we had a number of FileMaker hosting support tickets regarding WebDirect timeout issues.

The WebDirect Error

FileMaker WebDirect Error

Notice the message at the end: Invalid JSON from server: 1|X

If your WebDirect session was set to log out in less than 40 minutes, you may not have seen this error.If you changed the settings for an extended login time, greater than 40 minutes in 19.5.1 and greater than 80 minutes in 19.5.2, you surely would have noticed.

A post in the Claris Community Pages discusses how you can modify the wpe.prefs file to get around the maximum 60-minute timeout that the FileMaker Admin Console imposes on WebDirect Connections.

In our case, our users specified 480 minutes or 28800000 ms, and prior to the Nginx change, this worked.

Testing FileMaker WebDirect Timeout

We adjusted the /opt/FileMaker/FileMaker Server/Web Publishing/publishing engine/conf/wpe.prefs line: 14 (server/parameters/config/iwp-session-timeout) to 28800000 (8 Hours).

We tested in 19.5.1 and 19.5.2 and saw different max timeout times.

FileMaker Server 19.5.1: 2500000 ms or 41.66 minutes

FileMaker Server 19.5.2: 5000000 ms or 83.2 minutes

FileMaker WebDirect Developer Console

In the browser developer tools and console, we saw the following warning:

Websocket closed, reason: Connection was closed abnormally (that is, with no close frame being sent). - wasClean: false

log @ vaadinPush.js?v=8.12.3.fmi:1

warn @ vaadinPush.js?v=8.12.3.fmi:1

ax.onclose @ vaadinPush.js?v=8.12.3.fmi:1

Note that once this warning occurs the web page creates new WebSocket connections at the URI: /fmi/webd/PUSH

wss://server.fqdn.com/fmi/webd/PUSH?v-uiId=3&v-pushId=413193e2-e78c-4d5e-825e-b0054445aa72&X-Atmosphere-tracking-id=e6ff4fcc-68f7-44ac-b6a0-5db28e9943cf&X-Atmosphere-Framework=2.3.2.vaadin1-javascript&X-Atmosphere-Transport=websocket&X-Atmosphere-TrackMessageSize=true&Content-Type=application/json;%20charset=UTF-8&X-atmo-protocol=true

The Communication Issue

The communication is timing out to the back-end Tomcat service, which is utilizing something called Long Polling.

According to other sources referencing Load Balancers and Vaadin Push, we were able to determine that the issue is related to a Load Balancer or Reverse Proxy (Nginx is the reverse proxy in this case) timing out the WebSocket connection after the aforementioned timeouts.

The Workaround for FileMaker WebDirect

In order to avoid the communication error, we edited the Nginx conf located here: /opt/FileMaker/FileMaker Server/NginxServer/conf/fms_nginx.conf

In the server block we added a directive: proxy_read_timeout 86400. Then we saved and rebooted.

After this, we noted that FileMaker Server 19.5.1/19.5.2 running on Ubuntu 20.04 (Nginx) then obeyed the iwp-session-timeout in the wpe.prefs without issue.

**Please note: there is a reason Claris sets the max timeout in the FileMaker Server Admin Console UI to 60 minutes. When sessions run for long periods of time, WebDirect can cause a memory leak and require a cycle every so many hours. It is best practice to change your workflow to function within the 60 minute timeout period or setup automations to cycle the scripting engine. There are also security concerns leaving a web session logged in for long periods of time.**

FileMaker WebDirect and Ottomatic

At Proof+Geist, we know that the Claris platform is a key puzzle piece to any business tech ecosystem. And having a sturdy cloud hosting platform is a must-have in a world where innovation is constantly happening in the cloud. That's why we created Ottomatic, a worldwide, low latency hosting platform crafted to make your FileMaker apps soar.

With our world-class hosting platform, professional development tools, and expertise in both Claris FileMaker and web technologies, Proof+Geist is ready to innovate and help support your business.

Learn more about the Modern FileMaker Revolution.

· 12 min read
Angelo Luchi

FileMaker Server 19.5 Feature

We here at Proof+Geist and Ottomatic are pleased to say that the recent announcement of FileMaker 19.5 server is looking pretty great so far!

With over 400 bug fixes, performance enhancements, and security improvements, Claris says that this is their best release to date. In this post, we'll highlight some of the new features in 19.5 and provide an overview of the changes made to FileMaker Server.

· 2 min read
Angelo Luchi

These last few months have been a whirlwind for Ottomatic! We've been busy building a world-class, global, Claris FileMaker hosting infrastructure and adding upgraded features along the way.

A simple but effective part of a transparent cloud service is a status page. Today, Ottomatic is announcing its new status page, which will better inform our users about our data center and service statuses. In addition to real-time monitoring, it also adds the ability to subscribe via email and receive updates on issues and future maintenance notifications.