OATEK said:
We have FilemakerPro7 for cross-platform use (Windows/Mac). Some of our
Vista
machines can still connect using the FMPro7 client, and others fail. The
chief error is that FMPro7 cannot load the stack. On their site
(
http://filemaker.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/filemaker.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=213)
FM say that it is a Winsock error.
Has anyone faced this problem and solved the connectivity?
G'day Ken
(I'm assuming "Doll Martin" is the management consulting mob in Sydney -
right?).
Short answer is: I dunno. But, let me amplify on that
. First thing is
that, as I guess you are well aware, FileMaker Inc do not support FileMaker
Pro 7 on Vista; in fact the only versions supported on Vista are FileMaker
8.5v2 and FileMaker 9 (see FileMaker's KB article 6217). FileMaker Inc
discontinued *all* support for FileMaker Pro 6, back in December 2006, so
Version 7 must be getting close to end-of-life, as well. I know that
upgrading across a whole company is not trivial. But in terms of the support
you provide to your users ... if the combo of FileMaker Pro 7 and Vista
isn't supported by the software vendor, it's pretty tough for a help-desk to
try and support it! You may need to be firm with your users and tell them:
"if you want to run FMPro7, stay on XP".
But apparently, some of your Vista *are* successfully running FileMaker Pro
7, and successfully connecting to network databases. So it's not a
fundamental conflict between version 7 and Vista. In terms of providing
"best effort" solutions, I'd be inclined to try 2 things:
1) The Netdiag tool from the XP Support Tools also runs fine on Vista. If
you have the Support Tools from the XP CD-ROM installed on an XP machine,
just copy the netdiag.exe file across to a convenient location on a Vista
machine. Open a command prompt as Administrator and run this command:
C:\TEMP>netdiag /test:winsock /v
This will verify that TCP/IP and Winsock are correctly installed and
functioning. You can also do:
C:\TEMP>netdiag /v /debug /l
to run a wide-ranging network "wellness" test, and log the results to a file
called netdiag.log in the current directory.
2) compare a working and non-working machine, and look significant
indicators in the deltas. For a start, compare the network configuration of
each machine, with a:
C:\>ipconfig /all
and then do a netdiag /test:winsock and/or netdiag /v /debug on each
machine, and compare the results.
A further test would be to run Process Monitor on a working machine and a
non-working machine, as you try to do a FileMaker Open Remote on each. This
will log all the File and Registry interactions. You're probably familiar
with Process Monitor but just in case, you can download it from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processmonitor.mspx
You may see some different behaviour between the working and non-working
cases, around the server.pem file, or similar.
Other folks might have extra/better ideas for you ... hope this helps a bit,
anyway. Good luck with it.
