For quite a while, the documentation and product information for bBox has mentioned it as a way to run PHP scripts, but I only just recently realized that we never had any examples of how to do this.
Here are two methods to try.
Author: Simon Brown
bBox 0.80 Now Available
Posted in All, bBox, FileMaker, Python, Tools & Add-ons, Uncategorized
Its been almost a year since we’ve mentioned bBox on this venue, but we are now pleased to announce that version 0.80 is publicly available.
fmsadmin: where did you go?
I have a few scripts, including some Facter reporting “facts”, that make heavy use of FileMaker Server’s fmsadmin command. After a 14.0v4 on install on Yosemite I was puzzled to discover that one of the scripts wasn’t working.
Enable WebKit debugger in FileMaker Web Viewer
Posted in FileMaker 14, FileMaker 15, FileMaker 16, JavaScript, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons
If you are having difficulty getting your HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to render in a FileMaker Web Viewer, you may have a struggle ahead of you trying to find the problem, and no good way to debug it. In comparison, most web browsers have debug facilities that can help developers find problems in their code.
Continue reading “Enable WebKit debugger in FileMaker Web Viewer”
Keep FileMaker Server Web Logs at Fixed Paths
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques, Web Development
If you need to scrounge through the web server’s logs in the file system, the way FileMaker Server stores these on Mac OS can be a bit annoying. You end up with a bunch of files named like this:
Facter Reporting for FileMaker Server
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques
Recently we’ve been thinking about how we can better monitor the collection of systems that we manage. These can be client servers with very diverse configurations, access, or functions. Additionally, we have our own array of systems, almost as diverse as our clients’.
Updated FileMaker Fail2ban Files
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Tools & Add-ons
As an aid to improving the security of your server, Fail2ban is an open source component that checks for signs of abusive activity in your logs, and when these are detected, blocks an address (or possibly a subnet) for a given period of time. In May of ’13 I blogged about how to set up Fail2ban rules to check the FileMaker Server event logs (http://buzz.beezwax.net/mVfrR7).
Working with JSON data in FileMaker
Posted in All, bBox, FileMaker, JavaScript, Techniques
There are a number of ways of working with JSON data in FileMaker. At least two typical ones are:
- Custom Functions based parsing & encoding
- using a WebViewer & JavaScript
Version 0.71 of bBox Now Available
Posted in All, bBox, Beezwax News, FileMaker, News, Tools & Add-ons
A new version of our free bBox FileMaker plug-in is now available.
Some of the changes since the last release are:
- better support for Python results, in particular lists & sets
- curl, sort, bash, and grep commands now allow up to 7 parameters
- better handling of invalid parameters to FileRead and PasteboardGet functions
- added the Python function fm.evaluate
- more examples in the demo file
Summarizing FileMaker Server Access.log data
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker Server, Server Administration, Techniques
Various times I’ve needed to do some quick summaries of how a given server and its databases were being used. On macOS and Linux we can use shell commands such as grep to get a quick summary of what’s happening on a server.
Continue reading “Summarizing FileMaker Server Access.log data”Version 0.63 of bBox Now Available
Posted in All, bBox, Beezwax News, FileMaker, Tools & Add-ons
A new version of our free bBox FileMaker plug-in is now available.
Some of the changes since the last release I blogged about are:
- new fm.executesql Python function
- additional types when converting to/from Python
- new bBox_FileWrite, bBox_FileSymlink, and bBox_FileRead functions
Listing hosted FileMaker files from the shell
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques
As part of a shell script I’m cooking up, one of the required tasks is to list all currently hosted database files on a Mac OS based FileMaker server. This may get deployed over multiple servers, and I want to keep it as simple and trouble free as possible.
Continue reading “Listing hosted FileMaker files from the shell”
Java Applet Issues with Java 7 Update 51
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
Applets now are required to contain additional information in their .jnlp files to document the files used, either external or local. But if you are working with older code, such as the FileMaker 11 Server Admin Console, the required manifest information is missing and your applet will halt with an exception like this:
java.lang.SecurityException: Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar: http://localhost:16000/admin-client-lib/admin-console-client.jar
at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:744)
Enable Logging of Client Usage Statistics in FileMaker Server
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques
I was looking for a way to monitor client usage of FileMaker Servers over time.
Continue reading “Enable Logging of Client Usage Statistics in FileMaker Server”
Summarize how often databases are opened in FileMaker Server
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques
We needed to quickly know how often various databases were being opened on a client’s server.
If you have Access logging enabled and are using a Mac OS based system, this shell snippet will give you a nice summary of how often each database has been opened:
awk -F" '{ if($3 == " opening database ") print $4;}' '/Library/FileMaker Server/Logs/Access.log' | sort | uniq -c
Unfortunately, it won’t show you a count for databases that were never opened within the scope of the current access log.
Simon.
Fail2Ban with FileMaker Server
Posted in All, FileMaker, Server Administration, Techniques
I needed to configure a FileMaker Server (FMS) that would be an isolated system and accessible via the Internet.
Besides other precautions, like locking it down on the firewall as much as possible, changing the default SSH port, etc., I wanted to give the system some ability to defend itself against malicious access. FMS will prevent this to some extent, largely due to how the FMS Admin Console and the FileMaker client are designed.
Curl HTTP Post from FileMaker
Posted in All, bBox, FileMaker, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons
I was trying to test out some HTTP post transactions with the curl command, and things weren’t working.
One glitch was due to how the curl command parses its options. All characters, including spaces can be significant, so “-X POST” is not the same as “-XPOST”. This difference might be hidden if calling from the shell, which trims extraneous spaces in parameters, but I was calling via the bBox plug-in’s curl function, and this calls the command directly from FileMaker.
Debugging Apache with OSXS 10.8 Server 2.2
Posted in All, Server Administration
Besides being a bit of a mouthful, debugging Apache configuration issues has gotten slightly more complicated after Apple released the Server 2.2 update for Mac OS X Server.
Formerly, you could do a basic configuration check this way:
apachectl -t
Continue reading “Debugging Apache with OSXS 10.8 Server 2.2”
Code Signing a FileMaker Runtime
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques
I wanted to code sign a runtime to avoid issues with users who had the higher security level set on their 10.8 based systems. Although lowering these permissions or holding down the control key when the app is launched will all help with this issue, code signing seems a reasonable and desirable, and removed the support issue.
XML Parsing with FileMaker and bBox
Posted in All, bBox, FileMaker, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons
In order to more easily work with XML data, I’ve added the libxml2 library to version 0.54 of the bBox plug-in.
Among other things, libxml2 provides support for XPath 1.0 queries, which can be used to easily extract or set values from XML data, so XPath was my first choice. Although XML has lost a bit of its shine as JSON has come into vogue, XML is still integral to many systems, including FileMaker. Also, the XPath routines can be used for similar syntaxes, so for instance, you might find it helpful for scraping data from a HTML page.