Over the last week New Jersey Sage MAS 90 and SAP Business One consultant Mark Chinsky forwarded a cool (free) utility that I’d like to share.
Mark’s original message stated that he uses FileMon for Windows by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to see files that are being used by MAS 200. This real time utility is a powerful diagnostic tools for tracking down any number of issues including – hung files, system slowdowns, etc.
Using the program you can easily view precisely when each and ever file is opened, read, written or deleted.
Filters are available to keep the information reporting to a minimum and ensure you only see details that are relevant to your situation.
Former Sage Technical Support Wizard (that wasn’t his official title) Alnoor Cassim chimes in with the inside view of what he has used this handy utility for:
Right on! All the SysInternals tools from Mark Russinovich (all now part
of MS Technet) have been life savers when troubleshooting MAS 90/200.
I’m a major net promoter of these tools. I’d like to share a few ways
it’s helped me.
* Used Filemon to find ACCESS DENIED errors upon startup of MAS when the
Launcher was loading -> User didn’t have permission to rename some files
on their local machine upon startup
* Used Regmon to find ACCESS DENIED errors -> Led to positive proof of a
user registry permission problem for which IT guy of client insisted was
a MAS problem.
* Used Regmon to find ACCESS DENIED errors -> Led to discovery of a COM
failure bug in the MAS 4.0x Launcher, which was requiring Write access
to protected areas of the registry.
* Used psKill to kill orphaned pvxwin32.exe tasks on the MAS 200 server
that Task Manager could not terminate and so server didn’t have to be
rebooted
* Used Process Monitor to find bug in FAS 2008 uninstaller on an EES
implementation, that prevented FAS 2009 from being installed.
Today, Process Monitor is the tool that replaces Filemon and Regmon and
has a better UI.
I’ll stop there but I highly recommend these tools for the tech person
in the MAS consultant’s organization and of course to the clients’ IT
staff.