For posterity, here’s the resolution. For some yet-unknown reason, the
MacOS-based FM server machine is using the default OS config for Apache rather
than the FMS-installed one. This is probably due to some past OS or security
update which I was not party to. (It’s a client’s machine.) The site’s data
calls have been happily functioning on https since February, and suddenly a
machine restart killed it.
The default Apache config is not set up to support SSL (modSSL not active, no
SSL certificate in place) or to even listen on the designated https port
(8081). To get back online, I switched my web code settings to communicate with
the FMS machine using http on port 8080. I would prefer to have all my traffic
be encrypted, but since the two machines (web server and FM server) communicate
behind a firewall, I consider this to be acceptable for now.
In the long run, I will try to figure out what happened and repair the SSL
connection. At least the client is back online after a 13-hour outage.
Dale
On Sep 18, 2017, 3:23 PM -0400, Dale Bengston <dale.bengston@xxxxxxxxx>, wrote:
There were no OS updates installed according to the client. Initially, I
thought that’s why they restarted the server, but they just did it for no
particular reason. OS updates frequently break FMS, so I was happy to
eliminate that as an option. Back in June, they updated this machine to MacOS
10.12.5 and the net effect was that the WPE did not auto-start. They have
restarted the machine between June and today, with no further problems.
Today, pow. I just double-checked, and indeed MacOS is at 10.12.5.
Here’s the next clue. There is a fully-formed set of httpd.conf and sub files
in /Library/FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/conf/, along with SSL cert files.
However, the machine is loading the Apache config from /private/etc/apache2/
which doesn’t even have modSSL turned on.
Hmm, I’m remembering now that FileMaker installs its own instance of Apache?
Did the machine somehow default back to the OS instance here? Where is the
FMS version of Apache located? I can find config files, but no binary.
Have I mentioned that I did not set this server up myself? I’m just the guy
holding the bag.
Thanks,
Dale
On Sep 18, 2017, 2:31 PM -0400, Troy Meyers <tcmeyers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, wrote:
Dale,
Likely not the same thing, but if the restart also included installing a
macOS security update, that could have changed something. This happened to
me on my FX-running machine (not FMS machine) and it changed some security
issues and I had to modify some PHP to get it back to running. I was
getting "can't do SSL" sorts of errors.
-Troy
The web traffic has been on SSL on port 8081 since February when FMS15
was deployed. At 6:29am it was working fine. My client restarted the
machine at 6:30 and it’s no longer working.
One thing I noticed is that FMS seems to have forgotten some of its
deployment settings, like auto-starting Server and the WPE. Maybe it
forgot something else.
Dale
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