Jonathan Stark

Can't connect to FMS via the admin console? Kickstart tomcat

Posted on April 18th, 2008 by Jonathan Stark

My buddy Jim Burrell and I had a situation the other day where we couldn't connect to the FileMaker Server 9.0v3 with the Admin Console from either a remote machine or locally from the server box itself. It was clear that the database files were running fine because users were connected via FileMaker Pro as per usual. Since the Admin Console is a Java app, we suspected that the my local java installation had gotten screwed up, so I rebooted my machine (not the server).

This didn't solve the problem, so I trashed the Admin Console launcher app from my local machine and attempted to connect to the FMS box on port 16000 to download a fresh copy. My connection failed which lead us both to believe that the tomcat process on the server had died.

We figured a reboot of the FMS box would solve the problem, but since we couldn't open the Admin Console to close the files first, that was a bad option. We considered closing the files via the command line using fmsadmin, but that meant booting out about 40 users, which we also wanted to avoid. Some poking around revealed that there might be a way to just kickstart FileMaker's tomcat process, which ultimately did do the trick.

WARNING: Messing around on the command line is dangerous. If you are not familiar with this sort of thing, find someone who is.

Here's what we did:

1. Launch a terminal window on the FMS box (or ssh into it)
2. cd into the following directory like so:

   cd /Library/FileMaker\ Server/Admin/admin-master-tomcat/bin/

3. Run the following line:

   ./startup.sh

Obviously, we are running FMS on a Mac, so if you are on Windows you'll have to poke around a bit to find startup.sh on your platform.

NOTE: We first tried to run startup.sh without cd'ing into the directory first, but that caused an error because startup.sh could find some include files.