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ITDharamFlag for United States of America

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OSX Server running Quickbooks, shared files disappear over Logmein Hamachi

I have a client running OSX server with Quickbooks server.  In the office the clients connect just fine.  There are a number of users who connect remotely via Logmein Hamachi (A subscription based VPN tool).

Those users using Hamachi have a terrible time, and I'm trying to find out why.

With QB for OSX you can only open files if they are 'shared' by the QB server... you don't browse to them like you do in Windows.  The server is sharing about 40QB files, and on the remote clients they often don't see any of them.  If we go onto the server and stop sharing on one file, and share it again, all of a sudden we'll see that shared file, or sometimes all, we can also access the file and performance is great.  If we wait 2-3 minutes, the shared list is gone and they can't work.

While this is happening I can still browse via finder and see all the files so we haven't truly lost connectivity.

I've verified Hamachi isn't 're-routing' through their servers (NAT problem indicated by blue dot in Hamachi interface).  I've verified there is no software firewall in play.

I did read a note from QB saying that the QB server needs to appear in the 'finder' under shared devices, and that is typically not the case.  If I connect to one of the shares then it will appear under shared devices, but QB files don't appear in the QB gui unless I stop and start sharing via the QB server.

I imagine this is't going to make sense to you unless you've actually messed with these products, so here goes nothing hoping that one of you has done this!!
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John
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I think you are telling me people have the QuickBooks client application on their remote PC and trying to run a QB database remotely. Is this true?  It is not good practice because you can damage the database.  You say a local connection works fine.

With QB for OSX you can only open files if they are 'shared' by the QB server  <-- That is also true in the Windows server world as well.

Please let me know if I am correct in my first statement.
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Hi John,

You are correct, people are using QB on a local client accessing the DB across a VPN tunnel.

Understood about the possibility of corruption and I'm already prepping them that they might need to go to a QB enterprise on RDS, but for now we want to play this out.

If we do the stop share/share, the company file shows up, and accessing the file is smooth and reliable.  It is just getting the company files to show up reliably.
You are correct, people are using QB on a local client accessing the DB across a VPN tunnel.

This is not a good practice because QuickBooks is a very chatty database. Using over VPN can easily corrupt files.

You need to use Terminal Server with QB on the Terminal Server or a desktop computer with QB that users can remote into.
John, I hear you, and consider it noted.  Do you have any feedback regarding the question at hand?  Anybody else?
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John
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I've also seen QB databases damaged doing everything on a server with remote desktop access...QB has problems.

Thanks for your time.
Thanks.  QB is so chatty, it just does not run well this way.