Although Filemaker 9 and 10  aren’t supported on Lion and Mountain Lion anymore several of our customers still use it. As long as you upgrade from Snow Leopard everything is working as expected – even the “Open Remove” feature that is used to connect to a Filemaker Server.

The problem is, that whenever you try to reinstall Filemaker 9 Pro the required SSL Update fails to install. This happend because the OpenSSL used in this update is PPC only! After that you are still able to work on local FM databases but you are unable to connect to a remote server. The remote database list stays empty!

Luckily this problem can be easily fixed.

As far as I can tell the Filemaker application uses an SSL encrypted connection to transmit it’s data (or at least the database list 😉 ). To fix the encyption you only have to replace the certificate stored in the application bundle:

• /…/FileMaker Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/root.pem
• /…/FileMaker Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/server.pem

The following solutions are possible:

Obtain the certificates from a newer installation

The needed certificates are also installed by newer Filemaker versions. Just install the trail version or obtain the certificates from a different machine. To do that open the application bundle and copy the root.pem and server.pem files. To finish the surgery replace the original files (see above) in the Filemaker 9 bundle.

Download my files

To shorten the process I have uploaded my test certificates. You can also use them.