I spoke with Valerie on the phone about her problem, and here's her situation:
The office has one copy of Filemaker Pro installed on multiple machines;
they've applied for additional licenses through FM's donations program, but
have yet to receive any. So, each machine is running the same FM license,
which means that none of them can be running on the network at the same
time. They are definitely NOT running multi-user. They are simply using
the hard drive of one of the computers (call it Computer A) as an extension
of the other computers. When someone on one of the other computers
(Computer B) needs to access the database, the person on Computer A needs
to close Filemaker entirely. In this scenario, the folder that holds the
ebase files absolutely HAS to be shared, otherwise there's no way for the
other person to access them. There is no hosting going on at all.
We could not replicate the problem during our phone conversation. I
suspected a bad spot on the drive where the deleted_.102 file lives, and
had her (a) close ebase; (b) copy the deleted_.102 to another file ("Copy
of deleted_.102"); (c) rename the original deleted_.102 to "deleted_
bad.102"; (d) rename "Copy of deleted_.102" to deleted_.102. All of this
happened with no error messages.
We then opened ebase, created a new name then deleted the name with no problem.
She also reported, during the phone call, that the computer was running
much slower than normal today in all applications. I suggested that she
shut it down for several minutes, then restart it and see if that behavior
persists. I also strongly encouraged her to have her tech consultant check
out her hard drive for bad sectors developing.
>Not sure exactly what you mean here? Do you mean it's being hosted by a
>copy of FMP or FMP Server running on your file server, or is it that the
>ebase files reside in a shared directory on your file server, and then
>opened via the network by whoever needs to open the files?
>
>If it's the latter, please understand that this is NOT a recommended way
>to share Filemaker databases. Anytime you have the files in a shared
>directory, network activity can potentially interrupt your connection to
>the files. This can happen in many ways, and can sometimes result in
>blocked access, or even permanently corrupted files. Filemaker files are
>notoriously unstable.
>
>Better to either:
>*If you have many users who use it a lot, get FMP Server
>*If it's mostly one user with others using occasionally, put it on the HD
>of the most frequent user, and let this user host others through regular
>FMP when needed.
>
>That being said, other folks do set it up the way you're doing it. Just
>understand that it's probably causing the problem you saw today and could
>cause worse.
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Jack Noll - ebase consultant and wildlife advocate
Check out a *great* program at www.beardogs.org
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