[FX.php List] [Off-Topic] CDML/Web Server Connector consistently crashing

[Troy Meyers]

I thought I should mention, for what it's worth, that though we never used WSC, when we were using FMU 6 WebCompanion, a certain kind of web query would force the FMU 6 machine to go deaf, actually "beachballing" and the solution was to detect that state by using a separate computer to check it for normal response, and then if none was received, send a force-quit FileMaker command and restart command.

We used a packet sniffer to discover that every time this happened the query had a bogus kind of "User-agent" in the header. This would come from a variety of IP addresses. None appeared to be from legitimate users, so we've always presumed that they were generated by some sort of malicious software or nuisance-ware. I hesitate to mention just how the header was formed, because with that knowledge anyone can take down a site run by FMU 6, not a good tidbit of information to be out there in a forum.

Anyway, this is another possible cause of Unlimited going deaf.

This has not happened since we switched to FMSA 8 and Blackbelt/PHP/Apache, but it's only been a few weeks. I doubt that this is a vulnerability with this, though, so I feel pretty safe.

-Troy