Under its Administration: Administrator screen, FileMaker Server’s Admin Console has a feature you can use to restrict access so that only certain IP addresses are allowed to connect. Although usually a useful feature, here we’ll discuss how to turn it off if it isn’t working correctly.
Somehow this had been enabled on a server, resulting in the following message when trying to open the server’s admin interface:
Your machine (172.30.3.53) does not have access to the FileMaker Server Admin Console. Please contact the server administrator for help.
In the example above, 172.30.3.53 is the IP address I was connecting from. Since I had no idea what IP addresses were allowed (as it turns out, none were) I had no way to connect and change this value. After doing some digging around, I found that the access was controlled by the file at this location:
# Ubuntu
/opt/FileMaker/FileMaker Server/Admin/FAC/config/restrict_config.json
# macOS
/Library/FileMaker Server/Admin/FAC/config/restrict_config.jsonIn my case, the file indicated that the the feature was enabled, but no IP addresses were allowed:
{"restrictIPEnabled":true,"restrictIPList":""}This gave me an easy fix — edit the flag to false, and then restart the admin console:
fmsadmin restart adminserverSimon
Postscript
For some reason this fix was somewhat short lived. It has persisted so far after I changed it a second time and did a reboot on the server, so I’m hoping that the settings will stick this time. Or, it could be I should’ve stopped the adminserver process first, then edited the message. I’ll update this post later if find out definitively what is required.