I have just taken over an environment with an aging G3 running OS 9.2 with a legacy custom application called PAJ1 with no support and no upgrade path. The application is mission critical and has lately been failing. A reboot of the system temporarilly solves the problem.
I am a Windows Admin <ducks head> and appreciate any and all help.
When logging into the Server Admin the system locks up with error code 3 which the Help file suggests could be a memory issue. The system has only 256MB of memory. There are 65GB of free disk, so that should not be an issue.
Are there more detailed logs anywhere on the machine? Where can I look to make the system more stable? Since the custom app only runs on OS 9, how can I create some redundancy? Can I clone the system and put the data on a shared array so that if one machine goes down, I can turn up the other (active/passive cluster)?
Can I run OS 9 in later OS release - I seem to recall one could run 9 in a 10 in order to support legacy apps.
Since Apple has dropped support for OS 9, keeping a mission critical application on this operating system and hardware is asking for trouble. You should make every effort to find another that application to perform this function on the new operating system and hardware.
Thanks, Allan.
Unfortunately it will be awhile before the boss decides to replace the application, but she is well aware of the fragile nature of the situation.
In the interim, since I know my situation is not unique, I am hopeful some experienced Apple folks have some suggestions for me.
Sometimes a slightly damaged preference file can cause an app to fail when it tries to write to it. The usual solution for that is to throw away the particular preference file(s) the app uses, then restart the machine and reopen the program - new prefs files with default settings will be created automatically.
However - if a prefs file contains critical information, such as the serial number for a program, and that info is not available (recoverable) from somewhere else for re-entry when needed, it may be dangerous to throw such a file away.
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If there are similar problems with other applications on that machine, then there may be something else at play - such as a damaged font file, extension, or other piece of software common to all.
It always surprises the daylights out of me how management can consider an application to be mission critical and then sit around for over five years doing nothing about finding a replacement for it.
If the application is truly mission critical, they should have starting on finding a replacement as soon as Apple announced that support for OS 9 was being dropped. Right now after waiting this long, they are not going to get much sympathy from me.
All of the new hardware available today is no longer capable of running OS 9 in the "Classic" mode under OS X so the only thing they can do is go out and buy older hardware if the old system decides to give up and it will.
I can understand your position, and Allan's position. You've had this dropped on your desk, and you need any help you can get, while we can;t believe it's got so bad. I think we understand that you did not let it get so bad.
I side with Allan when you say the manager is not in a position to look at a replacement for the forseeable future. For a mission critical system, starting tomorrow isn't soon enough.
But anyway, what can we do for you ? It would help with a bit more info about the aging G3. Do you know what model it is ? or how fast the processor is ? There should be something called the Apple System Profiler in the Apple menu in the top left corner.
You also mention something about logging into a Server Admin. Is this part of the the PAJ1 application ? Or is it part of the Mac OS ? My first thought is that it's the Mac OS Server Admin software.
And if it is Mac OS Server software, what services does it provide ? That would suggest that there are also some other OS9 Macs communicating with it.
And do you have any more info about the PAJ1 software ? Does it have any other name ? If you find the application icon and perform a Get Info ... (in the Finder 's File menu, I think), what else does it tell you about it ? It will have the Suggested and Preferred Memory sizes here too, what are they ? I'm suspecting that it might be some sort of bespoke application written for your company. Perhaps you could then tell us what sort of functionality it provides. And is it a single user app, or does it provide a LAN service ?
Finally, although you have no support for the PAJ1 application, do you still have original disks and any required serial numbers (if it is Mac OS Server) for the Mac OS ? And for any other software that is installed. With 65Gb free space on the main disk in a G3, can we assume that this is not the original disk for the Mac (no G3 came with a disk bigger than 60Gb) ? and that the software has been re-installed at least once ?
Sorry there's only more questions, but it may help us with a more informative answer to your request for help.
Sorry - it is actually a G4. PAJ was custom made in the OMNIS environment. They were supposed to have migrated to PAJ2 and then to new CRM package, but now all three are in use and all important.
Here are the machines vital stats as per the System Profiler:
Mac OS Overview
Finder: 9.2 Quicktime: 5.0.2
System: 9.2.1 File Sharing: is on
Active enabler: none
Start up device
Name: Macinstosh Hard Drive Location: ID = 0
Type: ATA Hard Drive Bus: Internal ATA
Machine ID: 406 Processor info: PowerPC
Model Name: Power Mac G4 Machine Speed: 800 Mhz
Keyboard Type; Apple Extended Keyboard Processors: 2
Skipping Network and Printer Overviews
Production information:
ROM revision; $77D.45F6
Boot ROM Version: $0004.25f1
Mac OS ROM file version:8.4
Serial number: XB134029-KSJ-FF11
Software bundle: not applicable
Sales Order: M8361LL/A
Pretty small, eh? It looks like all three are used together given the time stamp.
It only shows as a document, so when I go to Get Info I do not get a chance to allocate more memory. I know that that has been done however, I just can't recall how I navigated to that option!
End user experience is as follows:
Mac and PC users have PAJ icos on desktop and drives mapped to this machine "Appleserver."
They log in and have GUI based data entry fields. Each user logon is unique.
Would it be possible to clone this machine with a beefier G4 using something like Carbon Copy? Plenty of machines on eBay.
I am working on scheduled backups using an old version of Retrospect (it had not ben backed up since May of 2003). If I know the data is safe, I'll worry less nowing I can just failover to another machine.
Thank you all for your input - I greatly appreciate it!
A most informative answer to all my questions. Not bad for a Mac newbie, even though you're a Windows admin. Being a Mac evangelist I'll put a bit of it down to the Mac's ease of use too.
OK, Dual 800MHz G4. A very good machine. And well capable of running OSX if we have to. More memory in the G4 would definitely help especially when (I mean if of course) you make the jump to OSX. But it would help now also looking at the three 250MB database files your Mac is serving.
PAJ sounds like an Omnis Studio database application. The good news about that is that there are more recent versions of Omnis Studio (put it into Google), that run under OSX. There's even a demo download available that you can use to test your application, but you are limited to about 25 records (I think).
I looked at Omnis Studio for Mac OSX about a year ago, as an alternative to FileMaker (along with 4th Dimension and mySQL), it's a first rate application development tool.
What we need you to do is find the Omnis Studio application. There should be a Find... item in the Edit menu in the Finder. There may be a number of Omnis Studio components installed so just search for filenames containing Omnis. One or more should be an Application. Same again, Get Info on them as you find them. The latest version is v4.2, the first version came out in 1997 or 1998 I think, so you can work out how old the Omnis Studio software is.
You will of course have worked out by now, that the database server software, Omnis Studio also runs on XP (and Linux too), so an upgrade to a later version of the database software is possible. It may even be possible to migrate the PAJ1 bespoke application and database to the same version of Omnis software used for PAJ2, even on the same platform.
Sorry, I still don't have any immediate answers for the G4 under OS9.2.2, but I feel you do have an upgrade path. It may still be PAJ1, but you will be able to move it to a faster computer with little efffort.
I would of course like to see you upgrade the G4 to OSX (when it will start to use its second processor). OSX 10.3.9 is maybe as far as you want to go, but it depends on the requirements of any Omnis software you install. More memory too, as much as you can stuff in, and it will really sing - Memory, more than anything else, makes database servers extremely fast.
HI, Charlie. You can try allocating more memory to the Omnis application itself, assuming there is a runtime application underlying the PAJ1 GUI.
The fact that restarting the server seems to alleviate the problems temporarily suggests that RAM fragmentation — a byproduct of OS 9's relatively primitive memory-management scheme — might be in play. If that's the case, increasing the installed RAM in the server to 512MB, 1GB or more would probably help, at least to the extent of lengthening the time between crashes. But to be confident that RAM fragmentation is part of the picture, you'd have to know that there had been some significant change in the users' habits, particularly with respect to the frequency with which they open and quit multiple applications that are hosted on the server, around the time the problems began to appear. If the server hosts only a handful of applications, and they are all open all the time, RAM fragmentation won't be significant or cause problems.
Fragmentation of RAM occurs because OS 9 can't dynamically reallocate RAM from one open application to another on an as-needed basis. When an application is opened, the OS seeks a contiguous block of RAM of whatever size the user has allocated to that program in its Get Info window. Finding one, the OS locks all other applications out of that block of RAM until the application using it is quit. Then that block is freed up — but it may not be contiguous with other available RAM, because the OS can't redistribute RAM to other running applications on the fly in order to create a single contiguous block of free RAM. The next time a big application is opened, if there is no contiguous block of available RAM as large as that application requires, the OS crashes. You can see that if many applications are opened and quit frequently, the available RAM is apt to be badly fragmented after a while, but if a handful of applications run all the time, fragmentation will be negligible. I'm guessing that your underlying Omnis engine probably runs all or almost all the time, so its required memory allocation is probably locked in at server startup. Fragmentation would then only become a problem for that app if the app were quit for a time, other apps were opened and claimed part of the memory it had released, and the app were then opened again without restarting the server.
Working from the hypothesis that RAM fragmentation is an issue in your situation, you might consider setting the server up to restart itself nightly when (perhaps) it isn't in use, thus clearing all the RAM. An alias of the Omnis engine should be placed in the System Folder > Startup Items folder, so it gets priority in the allocation of RAM on reboot. And the users should be prevented from quitting it, or instructed not to quit it, to insure that it retains its grip on the RAM that is allocated to it at startup. If it isn't practicable for whatever reason to restart the server nightly, then definitely boost the machine's installed RAM as much as possible, and restart it as frequently as circumstances permit.
With respect to cloning the server's drive(s): I assume your firm has implemented a backup strategy that routinely (maybe automatically, on a regular schedule) backs up the server's and the client computers' hard drives. I have no experience at all working in a server-based environment, so I don't know how cumbersome it would be to have the backup system also create a bootable duplicate of the server on a standby Mac, which would ordinarily not be in service for any other purpose, but could be quickly substituted for the regular server in the event of a hardware failure or major OS snafu. If feasible, that would seem a sensible precaution to take where an aging machine and OS are the foundation of the business.
You're correct in thinking OS 9 and OS 9-based applications can be run within OS X; that's called Classic mode, and it works well with most legacy applications. Whether yours is one of them would have to be determined by a careful trial before any commitment was made to go that way.
I will look more closely at upgrading/migrating to a newer machine, OS, Omnis or all of the above. In the meantime, what is the preferred backup software for Macs? Is anything built in? I'd like to just hook up an external drive and schedule regular full backups with native OS 9 software if it exists.
Retrospect Backup from EMC is top of the bill, although you'd need an earlier version, ie. v5 for OS9. If you already use the Server edition of this (even in a later version) for your PC network, you can install the OS9 client and have the server initiate the backup for you (back onto a backup server).
There's also a few freeware OS9 offerings from backup solution (external disk) providers. LaCie SilverKeeper is the most raved about of these (
http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/ ) and even the current version is OS9 compatible.
I'm sure that you know already, but backing up databases does require extreme care, not only making sure that everything is backed up, but that transactional integrity is maintained. Caches must be flushed, database availability may have to be withdrawn while the backup is being made, etc. Check the Omnis Studio software description for availability of special backup software for it's databases. From my evaluation, I do remember some packages did have their own backup softwware, ACI 4th Dimension definitely did, Omnis might have too.
Oracle. I should have spent more tie with that when I had the chance back in 1999 when I was loading 8i on Solaris boxes. Ah, the dot-com days...
I am in touch with an Omnis consultant who wants to look at some key files to determine if and how to migrate the application to the latest version of Omnis. Getting the files to him is posing the greatest challenge as the CD burner on the machine (Mac)does not work and traversing the Windows network in either direction gives me errors. I can see the Mac and map the drive, but when I click the resource, I get the error:
"\\appleserver\MacIntosh HD is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The specified server cannot perform the requested operation."
To attach to the Mac from a PC I just go Start > Run and the UNC path. This prompts me for credentials and I enter those of my local Mac account which is an administrator. That lets me see the folder, but when I click I get the error above.
I have tried going the other direction from the Mac to a shared folder on a Windows server and I get the same reaction - I don't have rights. I have tried with several existing and new accounts.
Ah, anything Oracle on Solaris tends to be enough to put one off Solaris or Oracle or both.
Hoping the Omnis consultant can help you, but in reality you could probably make a good start all by yourself, time permitting. There must be something along the lines of a migration guide in the current Omnis documentation.
Connecting OS9 and Windows was always a real issue. I only managed to get my Macs connected to XP (and vice versa) in OSX (and it was a breeze).
In theory it should be possible to connect to the Mac from Windows with Apple's FileSharing running on the Mac. The Mac needed to have
TCP/IP enabled, which it sounds like you do,
File Sharing enabled, which you may or may not have,
Allow File HSaring clients to connect by TCP/IP, which you may or may not have.
You can start to check these by opening the File Sharing Control Panel (Apple menu, down to Control Panels). And then checking the File Sharing status of the disk (select the Macintosh HD disk in the Finder, and perform a Get Info (command-I), there should be a Sharing tab.
You need to do both, one enables File Sharing, the second selects what disk / folders you are going to share (the whole of Macintosh HD).
I can't help you with setting up file sharing the other way, something I never tried, as the Windows sharing protocol seemed to change with every version of Windows.
If there's still no success, we could look at an FTP client for the Mac, assuming you have an FTP server on the Windows side. And then the very last resort would be some sort of web sharing, accessing the files on the Mac using a web browser. But we'll get to that if we have to.
