Skip to main content

18 posts tagged with "filemaker server"

View All Tags

· 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.

· One min read
Martha Zink

At Proof+Geist, we know that the Claris platform is a key puzzle piece to any business tech ecosystem. And having a sturdy 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.