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’.
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).
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”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”
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”
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.
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.
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:
Continue reading “Debugging Apache with OSXS 10.8 Server 2.2”
I needed to investigate why a script was being run, and I was pretty sure cron was launching it. The problem was, little useful information was being logged, and no one was sure how it had been set up or what user it was under. Although launchd is now the preferred mechanism on Mac OS for these kinds of things, you’ll still see many systems where cron is being used.
First, you want to become the root user. The following Terminal command is one way to accomplish this:
sudo -s
Continue reading “List cron entries for all users on Mac OS X”
I wanted to quickly create a firewall port forward (AKA NAT rule) for the Terminal Services port on a Cisco ASA 5505. Since it had initially been setup using ASDM, it seemed natural to also create the port forward this way.
We have a wiki server running Mac OS X Server 10.6, and rather than have users type something like this:
http://bbox.beezwax.net/groups/bbox
which would be the standard URL, we instead wanted to use the much simpler:
Most FileMaker Server setups on OSX that I have seen are using the default permissions as set by the FilerMaker Server (FMS) installer. When viewed in the Terminal, they look like this:
drwxrwxr-x 11 fmserver fmsadmin 374 Jul 16 12:54 Databases
Continue reading “Setting permissions for FileMaker Server’s Database folder”
