MKS Toolkit is kind of funky and does things a little unusual. Now it's acting up on us and we are seeing really strange behavior.

Specifically, last night it erased itself. :angry:

We think that this is a licensing issue. We've contacted Lawson about this. In the past, we've had them recommend contacting MKS for patches. MKS has told us to contact our VAR for support. Catch-22! :banghead:

Has anyone else had problems like this?

What exactly do you mean "it erased itself"?
I doubt a licensing issue would lead to files being erased, seems very unlikely, has anyone written any new scripts that weren't tested well? Especially of the nature:

find -mtime .... -exec rm -rf ...

:lol:

I woudl restore from your last backup and see if you have any licensing issues, but I doubt Lawson is going to help you with this one.

Lawson has always told me to get the licensing and updates directly from MKS. The PCS support is only about $80 a year to get free upgrades. It's been a few years since I've had to contact their support, but I think there is some support with it that isn't extra $'s, at least probably during the 90 day period after the cyclical upgrade...

Yes, Lawson is not helpful.

The files were erased -- looks like an incomplete uninstall -- and both times it occurred on the 1st of the month.

MKS 7.5 installed on 1/2/2001
MKS 7.5 erased on 1/2/2006 -- 5-year anniversary
MKS 8.7 installed on 1/3/2006
MKS 7.5 was still on the systems! Incorrect install!!
MKS 8.7 erased on 3/2/2006 -- 60 days later

That has all the earmarks of a classic timebomb. MKS claims that MKS Ver 8.7 has no licensing issues, and it should not be erasing itself. However, I wonder if they are not aware of what someone may have put in over 5 years ago.

On your other track, I checked for the command "rm" in our scripts subdirectory. Whoops! Look-a at dat, Ma! Something to research... Perhaps that's our problem. Especially after both Lawson and MKS do not seem to have anybody else having this problem. Thanks for the suggestion!

We checked the scripts and the logs, and did not find anything. We think that we found the problem. It concerns the non-orthodox way that MKS Toolkit installs:

When MKS Toolkit goes to do a standard install, it looks for the first disk (C:). If it finds an MKS Toolkit directory already there, it goes to the next disk (D:) and looks for an MKS Toolkit directory there. Eventually, it finds a clean disk and installs there.

In order to install MKS Toolkit correctly, we found that we have to use the Custom Install option. This allows us to install over an old MKS Toolkit install.

In our case, we had a bad uninstall, which left a blank and mostly empty MKS Toolkit directory on the C: drive. The new version of MKS Toolkit installed on the D: drive. Not realizing this, we thought that MKS was on the blink again. MKS Toolkit's System Environment variables were really all over the place, some pointing to the C: drive and some to D:. Combined with other issues in our server, the result was that some part of MKS became inoperable and brought down the lalogin and lrs services.

OH yeah, that find command thing has happend to me many times on NT. Its very annoying and I noticed even when I set it up at the begining of the path from time to time find would still not work. I think I had the same problem with another command, don't remmeber it now.