Folks,
It's been an interesting couple of weeks in my shop, we seem to have had oodles upon oodles of server crashes. I'd like to run them past you to see if anyone can vouch for plausibility or otherwise offer insight to how/why this might happen.

CASE 1:
Suddenly WF server's 'Start Security LDAP' process starts to give the following error and dies. "Cannot remove dir: C:\Temp\edatemp\edapdfm reason: Permission Denied. Cannot Create tmp dir Workspace Manager stopped." What we found was that the admin id seemed to no longer have permissions in the c:\temp directory and the server died when trying to write an error to the above log (edapdfm). The server team swears no file permissions/policy changes were instituted. The fix was to explicitly add the admin to the file structure with full rights (was inherited, previously).

CASE 2:
Developer runs code with APP HOLDMETA and APP HOLDDATA and brings down the server with '...RETREIVAL KILLED (FOC026) THE REPORT IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE'. It seems the developer was executing a multi-step process to hold a large file into a local long-term storage area for further processing. The file is ~10 MB and the data file (.FTM) seems to be writing out as FOCUS format but the data writes out on a single line (that is over 104 Million characters). The master (meta) file that writes out is format text. When the developer goes to read this file via a TABLE FILE, the server dies. Is all of this enough to kill the server?

Any insight is appreciated.

- ABT

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Case 1: when the server can't read/write to the temp directory, this is what is supposed to happen. As to why this suddenly happened, we can only guess. It might be that somebody inadvertantly did change permissions, could also be an update to the server, could be anything actually.

Case 2: It is indeed not advisable to have the system read/write such large records. This is probably caused by issueing a 'HOLD AS name' statement where the format is not specified. This will then default to binary, which tries to write everything as one record. Try the same but then with 'HOLD AS name FORMAT ALPHA'.

Thanks for the feedback GamP. In case #2, the user's train of thought was to get a large initial dataset, hold it locally and then slice it and dice it multiple times over the course of the month to get ongoing reports as needed (rather than pull the large dataset down, 'HOLD AS' and run reports from it there).

The user's issue was along the lines of "well this has been working fine until now, I don't know what happened". I vote in the camp of 'explicit define', as you mention.

- ABT