NEED URGENT HELP

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "T Crabtree" <tcrabtree21 at yahoo.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 10:53 AM
Subject: NEED URGENT HELP


> Hello,
>
> I need from anyone with old school FilePro knowledge.
> I need to restore an old installation of FilePro Plus
> version 4. It is on SCO UNIX Release 3.2v4.0y. I know
> this is very old, but all company files from 1992 on
> are in this program, and replacement at this point is
> not an option. I need to get this restored as soon as
> possible. I have been working on it for three days.
>
> My problem is FilePro itself. I have 5 discs (the blue
> ones from back when FilePro was from The Small
> Computer Company). In UNIX, I used the sysadmsh
> utility to untar the contents of the discs, which puts
> the files in /appl/fp. It also puts some files in
> /tmp. I also have the last backup the company made,
> and those files are untarred to /appl/filepro.
>
> It is at this point that I am lost. Running "p"
> doesn't do anything. I have to run "./p" to get into
> FilePro, but it doesn't recognize the files in
> /appl/filepro. I get errors when I try to run the name
> of the company menu (e.g. ./p ndsmenu)
>
> It says "****System Error Occurred ****"
> "Cannot access menu"
> "/appl/fp/menus/ndsmenu": No such file or directory
>
> I am lost at this point. The files I need to use are
> stored in /appl/filepro. My /etc/default/fppath file
> has three lines in it:
>
> /appl
>
> /appl
>
>
> Can anyone steer me in the right direction? I don't
> think I have installed FilePro Plus correctly. I need
> help.

The backup needed to include /appl/fp as well as /appl/filepro
so that the following things that are usually customized are part of the 
backup:
/appl/fp/menus
/appl/fp/lib/config
/appl/fp/lib/edits
/appl/fp/lib/*.prt

Anything else can be replaced from a fresh install and/or deduced.
The menu's and the config file are the biggies.
Can't really invent those.

However, on the plus side, they don't change very often so you don't need a 
*recent* backup of them, almost any old one will do. Do you have an old copy 
somewhere? Maybe right on the same machine in an alternate directory?

Without the menus you can access the files directly which may be only good 
enough for looking at data. Definitely you won't have any preconfigured 
reports and accounting posting routines etc...

How were the backups made? What script, what commands in the script? If we 
know that we can tell you how to read the contents of the backup to see what 
all is in it. Sysadmsh is not really a good idea for this. If it's a tape 
and you don't know how it was made (maybe it was an fp menu choice and the 
fp menus are gone?) then there are a few reasonable guesses that won't hurt 
to try. like:
tar tvf /dev/xct0 2>&1 |grep menus
or
cpio -ivtB </dev/xct0 2>&1 |grep menus
for starters

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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