Putting a Filemaker Pro Database online 


With the help of a consultant, Jim gets a static host name from DynamicDNS and publishes a database of performed plays on the web. 

Today I accomplished something that I have wanted to do for several years now, I published from my desktop an online database of all the plays that have been produced by the Second Sunday Dinner Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri. This amateur dinner theatre group started producing plays in December, 1973, and continued once a month up to the present day. Some of the original members are still in the group. The online database is searchable for Play, Author, Host, Director and Date. Also, those with editing privileges may add or change records. 
 
A couple of years ago, I took a Microsoft Word file that Barbara had kept of all the plays and converted it to a FileMaker Pro database. I have version 6, which is about two versions behind. Nevertheless, even this version allowed the publication of databases on the web. All that was needed was a fixed IP address. When I still worked at SIUE, I had a fixed IP address, and the database was published on the web then. 
 
Since I have retired, however, I buy DSL connectivity from Yahoo! DSL through my phone company. I have connected a Linksys router to the DSL modem and have set up an Ethernet network with three computers on it: an iMac G3, iMac G4, and a Powerbook 15". Such a network has a great advantage in providing broadband connectivity for more than one computer for the price of one DSL connection. The downside is that now the computers are all assigned Dynamic IP numbers by the router. This just means that it is possible that a computer may not get the same IP number every time. (In practice, on a small network, it is very probable that the computers will keep their IP’s, but Filemaker database connectivity needs that static IP number or a stable URL address.) 
 
Today, with the help of my consultant friend, Don Ellis, we managed to solve this problem. I probably couldn’t have done this by myself, maybe not even now after I’ve seen it done once.  
 
First, we went to DynDNS (http://www.dyndns.com/) and registered with a user id and password. You can get one free account, but you must agree to a number of restrictions. Once we did this we assigned the router IP to a domain name address. There are a number of generic domain names to choose from, including .kick-ass.org and isa-geek.net. We chose the more sedate .selfip.org, to and prefixed a string of letters to this, and assigned it to my router IP address. So my URL looks like xxxxxxx.selfip.org. I don’t think I’ll publish it because I only want qualified users, namely the members of the Dinner Theatre. 
 
Having done that, we downloaded a program called DynDNSUpdater 1.2. Once this is done another program, a widget that goes in Mac’s dashboard, keeps checking to see if the machine it is on has changed IP addresses. If and only if this has changed, it reassigns the new number to the domain name address. (In fact there is a penalty for checking with DynDNS when the IP has not been reassigned—you can loose your domain name address.) 
 
Anyway, it worked and I am proudly purveying my database on the web, published from my own desktop.  

Posted: Sat - November 19, 2005 at 04:04 PM          

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