Microsoft Has Broken Windows Again - No Event Viewer/No Dynamic FMS 18 Server Logs

Great work Cecile, as you may or may not have noticed, I’ve pretty much abandoned use of the formal community, but this looks great.

A year ago Microsoft broke their own RemoteApp software, which thankfully a Microsoft community site helped us get around. To celebrate the anniversary of this they have now broken the Event Viewer in their latest Windows update releases. This is a big problem as FileMaker have taken away the logs within FileMaker and the only way we can dynamically view logs is through the Windows Server Event Viewer. Thankfully, in our case, we’ve set up a custom view in Event Viewer called ‘FileMaker Server 18’ - if we hadn’t done this, I think our only option was to continually download logs from the server admin (we haven’t tried this, I’m assuming that the Event Viewer problem doesn’t affect this).

Providing a custom view has been setup, there is a work around as follows:

Copy the function in the attached ‘EventViewer Function.txt’ file (had to edit this after posting, as the function pasted here got formatted incorrectly after posting, so have changed it to the file contents).

Launch a PowerShell window and paste (top left corner icon, Edit -> Paste

Press the return key twice to complete this until the ‘PS’ prompt returns.

Enter get-EventViewer

The custom views will appear.

Type in of the custom view, in our case FileMaker Server 18

The FileMaker logs will commence scrolling.

HOWEVER. In our case our logs go back to April and this takes the complete buffer from PowerShell and it only displays from the beginning of April to the end. If you don’t want to play around with the log files, run as described above but quickly press the CTRL C keys, which will stop the function from running. As it starts at the beginning, all of the latest log entries can be viewed.

The up arrow can be used to repeat the recent commands, allowing the logs to be redrawn as necessary, not truly dynamic but better than constantly downloading and opening files.

Microsoft have rushed to help as usual by planning to role out a fix sometime around late June. In the meantime, if you haven’t previously setup a custom view for FileMaker, your only option is file downloads (as far as I’m aware).

As my wife and partner would say - ‘new and improved’!

Regards
AndyEventViewer Function.txt (837 Bytes)

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Have you looked at Nutshell Console from 1-more-thing.com? Nutshell Console - 1-more-thing

We just purchased it, and are waiting for the multi-server version to be released. It’s easy to use, and very nice.

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Good sense of humor as always. :slight_smile:

“All generalizations are bad.”
– anonymous

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I can’t say much here (I don’t have fms18 under Window) - but I’m happy to meet You here (-:

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I don’t call it Micros**t for no reason :stuck_out_tongue: I had developed an add-in for Office in 2014. Best practice was to put the building blocks in the users building blocks folder of the templates directory. One morning, client calls: add-in wasn’t working. I used it the night before. Open Word, sure enough, not working. Before going through hundreds of lines of code, I remember an update took place before shutting down the pc the night before. I look through folders and I realize that the building blocks were gone. Their stup*d update had overwritten the USERS’ folders! How many minutes/hours of troubleshooting and than finding the last backed up copies of the wiped out files did companies around the world spend that day?!
From then on my addin installed its own root directory where I kept the files used during the sessions!

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Thank you for mentioning.
You can download a trial version from the website. I’d be curious to know how it solves (or maybe doesn’t?) your problem with the log from April.
FileMaker Server splits the log into logname.log and logname-old.log
Nutshell Console merges the files before displaying the result, which makes it easier to work with.

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Hi Josh

We tend to try to avoid too many 3rd party add ons, as we’ve a suite of cloud Windows vms to support, we streamline them to their minimum requirements and bolt down security very tightly, so that they only have what they need to run/stream FileMaker/FileMaker Server.

Interesting to hear about Nutshell Console and I’ll keep it in our ‘armoury’ just in case.

All the best
Andy

Hi Markus

You to! I won’t go anything regarding the official community other than I don’t have the time to try to work out what is where. I do log in daily to scan what is being posted, but that’s the main problem, you can’t do it quickly.

This is nice and I hope Cecile can keep it running, however, how anyone can find time to do much outside of developing (and in our case running a business) should be highly admired.

Kindest regards
Andy

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Hi Cecile

We’re a little more agnostic. Having used Macs since 1985 and used Windows since the Lotus 123 days (I lie, that was orange on black command line), both have their strength and weaknesses.

Microsoft have to be respected for their legacy support, Apple pretty much writes off all software older than 3-years, hence we all have to have a Windows VM to run FileMaker 11 onwards (we’ve even had to run v5, as these systems are still out there).

The freedom we get from using our own cloud servers based on Windows is fantastic. We employ our nephew who is based in Ireland and Val and I are working from there at the moment, I’ve fixed things on an iPhone traveling at 100mph on a German autobahn, fixed things in piste bars and kept the business ticking over from a clipper sailing ship around the Thailand/Malaysian coastlines courtesy of satellite Internet.

For that, I am very grateful to Microsoft.

Keep up the good work.

Andy

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Hi Fabrice

Thanks for the additional info. It does sound interesting and nice to meet you here.

Andy

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I only got my first mac mini a couple months ago :wink:. After learning programming (visual basic) on an Atari with cassette then Commodore 64 in 1985, I recall working as a temp on 80/88 then 280/88 pc and the long evolution that followed. I guess I’m like a grumpy old wife who likes to dislike her old companion. :joy:

Envoyé de mon iPhone

I started with programmable pocket caculators (HP RPN), typewriter-terminals (basic), then Epson HX20 (basic), then the first Apple ][ (basic, later the first Unix on that), later a Macintosh (lightspeed C)
VAX/VMS on my job as engineer, Solbourne/SUN (Unix), MimerQL, Oracle as database, Siemens/IBM MVS, later PC’s, Windows 3.1…

Later, I traveled through the whole country here just to find one guy who could show me what that ‘www’ is, then (after knowing a little bit more) running mosaic, lynx (text browser). 1200/2400baud modems…

old??

(-:

Just enough wise owl

Not sure I’ll ever get to the wise stage, I have a stupid gene as well, but am now having to consider future decisions carefully balancing against my (our) age and needing more young employees to move us forward long-term.

Mid 70s I was on a JAP, then late 70s Jawa and Weslake and retired from my chosen profession at the time (going around in circles without brakes, great training for running a small software business) in the early 80s on a GM. 1985, Macintosh!

Using this to see how the thread pans out. I’m not sure it is easy to trace which entry the reply is being made against?

I like the slider on the right though.

When you use the respond arrow beneath someone’s comments it add to whom the message is addressed.
When you use the arrow beneath the timeline or the one completely at the bottom of the thread, you respond to OP.

Just realized that it doesn’t do that on safari on my iPhone

Now that I have installed the discourse app let’s see…

Yes baby!!! Love this platform!

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I'm with you there. In this case, however, the need to monitor the server and diagnose quickly has far outweighed any minor risk by running Nutshell. The single server version, I believe it's the only one available at the moment ( NutShell Console Lite ), runs directly on the server. So you just fire it up, and look at the stats right on the server. Very simple, doesn't require opening any port etc.

This is the product I was hoping the community would make, when I first heard FMI removed the log viewer from the admin console.

In the world of server administrators...it's very common to use 3rd party tools to monitor everything. Things like Zabbix included.

I must admit, we are definitely going to look at Zabbix. We've an SBA server cohosting a number of solutions that has run faultlessly with FMSv16 for nearly 2-years. However, without any configuration changes and only the standard updates being applied the script engine has started to fall over and we're having to restart it in command line at least twice a week and sometimes more.

Something that can report, alert and correct issues like this will be invaluable. I believe I read recently that the FMSE is one of the things that can be automatically restarted within Zabbix and hopefully Wim's Devcon session will become publicly available in the future (we have a problem traveling to the US as we've customers in Asia, India and the Middle East, so start early each day to ensure any problems can be dealt with should they occur, although we also have East Coast US and Trinidad & Tobago clients, so the days tend to be long :sweat: but wouldn't sleep at all if we were in any of the US timezones) - smiley's work :+1:

So I see. It is possible to use quotes to tie in the person’s name I see, but would be good if we could also have the app type reply within the web interface. I believe Jive used to do this if the fading memory serves correct?