Subtitles of the Movie

We're continuing our discussion in this movie of best practices for deployment and Filemaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced and we'll be focused here on reading the logs. A key feature of most of the logs is the timestamp and its important to know how to read that timestamp. It has a distinct format and you have to understand what that format is in order properly to read it. So let's look at an example of what the timestamp in one of the logs looks like. There's a date portion which gives the year followed by the month number followed by the date. There's a time portion which is a 24 hour format giving the hour, the minutes and the seconds to the one, one thousandth of a second if needed and finally there's a number that gives the offset of the servers clock from GMT, plus or minus according to where the server clock has been set. In this instance we have a GMT of minus 4 which is United States East Coast Daylight Time. So let's look at some sample logs and see some of the information that are contained in them. We're going to look at an access log, we're going to look at an event log and these have been introduced into a FileMaker Pro database for easy reading and comparison. You'll recall from a previous movie that there are a number of applications that can open and read these logs, in this instance we've used FileMaker Pro. So let's look at these. Alright here we're looking at an access log and you can see these timestamps similar to the ones that I just showed you. We also have a field for the event type and the event type id and in the server administrator's guide that comes with the FileMaker Server Products there's more information about these particular pieces of data. We have here also a field that gives the name of the host server. But here's the interesting field, the event description and let's just take a look at this one that I've colored in red here to start with. We notice that a client called web test is opening a connection using scriptmaker, this is an example of a schedule that is running a server side script and that scripts name is web test and so it was opening an connection to the server for the purpose of running that server side script in a file that was hosted on the server. Now here we have an instance of where I am opening from this particular IP address or actually closing a connection here from this machine, the Aveo laptop posing a connection. You notice here that web test is now closing a database named test network where it was running this script previously and there are all types of similar pieces of connection information here that tell when someone is opening or closing a connection. Here I'm opening a connection from an IMac machine and I'm using Filemaker Pro Advanced 8.5 V1 and this is a FileMaker Pro network connection. So this information propagates through out this particular log. Let's now look at the event log and here again we see, here's the familiar timestamp, here's the event type and the event type ID and here's the name of the hosting server. But let's see what its telling us here, it's telling us that we're stopping the Filemaker database engine and we're stopping FileMaker server. Here we have an instance of where we've opened the database, the server sample database. We've opened the database called test network, we've opened the database called city and all of these particular databases have been used in some of the example that we've shown through out this entire series of movie tutorials. Here we have some more information that the server has started, the database engine has started, it reports to us that XDBC, meaning ODBC or JDBC connections are allowed and that the database cache is 64 megabits and if we saw this piece of information we'd really want to go in and take a look because that's probably too low for the cache. Here we have information that the maximum number of Web Publishing sessions is ten. Here we have information that we have not disabled, you have to know exactly the wording here. Open files without consistency check disabled, meaning that the files are checked for consistency. Here again starting the database engine, we've disabled the automatic updates, server scheduling is enabled, the maximum idle client time is 2 hours, statistics are set to be collected every fifteen seconds. Authentication method, FileMaker and external server, maximum number of files to host, 50. Flush interval one minute, IWP connections allowed. So as you can see this gives a great deal of information about what is actually going on in the server, how the server is configured and how it's running. So to review, we've learned how to read the logs and we've learned how to read the all important timestamp information so that we know exactly how to interpret on what day and at what time an event is recorded and in situations where we need to make sure exactly what the offset of the clock from GMT is we can tell that. if servers are in different time zones or if users are connecting from time zones this can be very helpful. We've looked at some sample logs to see the type of information that they convey and I think you'll see that they have a great deal of information in them. That concludes this particular series of movies on best practices. sample logs to see the type of information that they convey and I think you'll see that they have a great deal of information in them. That concludes this particular series of movies on best practices.