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#System Administration

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System administration refers to the management of one or more hardware and software systems.

Documentation on InterSystems system administration.

InterSystems Official
· Sep 24, 2018
Advisory: VMWare vSAN and Data Integrity

September 24, 2018 – Advisory: VMWare vSAN and Data Integrity

Clients running vSAN 6.6 or later should review a very important article that VMware published on September 21, 2018. The article describes the possibility of file system and database corruption, which can lead to outages and possible data loss, and we believe that some of our clients have encountered this issue. Therefore, we encourage you to act on this as soon as possible.

The VMWare knowledge base article is titled:

Virtual Machines running on VMware vSAN 6.6 and later report guest data consistency concerns following a disk extend operation (58715)

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Question
· Sep 25, 2018
Wireshark with ensemble

Hi,

We see a lot of TCPIP connection error for few of the components not sure if it is a network glitch at the source/target or is it with us. And most of the times these errors are very transient and vanish on their own and the connection gets re established and the messages get processed. Here is the error we mostly see

ERROR <Ens>ErrTCPTerminatedReadTimeoutExpired: TCP Read timeout (30) expired waiting for terminator SegTerminatorAscii=13, on |TCP|50007|10620, data received =''

or

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I am trying to track down a problem we saw this morning with our TEST environment. We had a momentary issue where InterSystems HealthShare Health Connect could not connect correctly to LDAP. When we tried to login and could not connect to LDAP, the system would Delete our users.

the Test LDAP function would return a "Can't contact LDAP server". I went through the Certificates, made sure they had the correct permissions and were not expired.

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What is Journaling?

Journaling is a critical IRIS feature and a part of what makes IRIS a reliable database. While journaling is fundamental to IRIS, there are nuances, so I wrote this article to summarize (more briefly than our documentation which has all the details) what you need to know. I realize the irony of saying the 27 minute read is brief.

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Currently we are exploring how we can allocate additional disk space to our current environment as we have seen a significant increase in growth of our Database files. Currently we have 3 namespaces, all with 1 IRIS.dat each that contains both the Global and Routines.

Since we have started down the route of everything within a single IRIS.dat file for each namespace, is it logical as we see growth to be able to split the current IRIS.dat for each namespace into a separate IRIS.dat for global and a IRIS.dat with for routines for each namespace in a Mirror environment?

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For practical reasons, it may be desirable that after a Linux server restart, the IRIS instance is automatically started.

Below you will find the steps to follow to automate the startup of IRIS during a reboot of the Linux server, via systemd :

1. Create an iris.service file in /etc/systemd/system/iris.service containing the following information

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

Temporary globals stored in the IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases are used when a process does not need to store data indefinitely, but requires the powerful performance of globals. The IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases are not journaled, so using temporary globals does not create journal files.

The system uses the IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases for temporary storage and are available to users for the same.

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Article
· May 24 15m read
VIP in GCP

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in GCP, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to GCP, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in GCP as subnets always span the entire region). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without using Load Balancers suggested in most other GCP reference architectures.

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When there's a performance issue, whether for all users on the system or a single process, the shortest path to understanding the root cause is usually to understand what the processes in question are spending their time doing. Are they mostly using CPU to dutifully march through their algorithm (for better or worse); or are they mostly reading database blocks from disk; or mostly waiting for something else, like LOCKs, ECP or database block collisions?

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I found myself in the not-so-comfortable situation of working with a Linux system on which someone had accidentally disabled user access to the Linux shell. HealthConnect was running, servicing hundreds of interfaces. To resolve the access issue, though, we needed to bring the host down for the application of a fix.

Without the shell, the iris command is not available to control the instance, so we were faced with the potential of shutting down the server ungracefully. We wanted to avoid that if possible ...

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I have a few routines in ^rINDEX that are missing in ^ROUTINE. At least some of those routines lack a timestamp, probably Date and Time Modified in ^rINDEX. It causes D %RO crash when such a routine is referenced by a routine range, since "" is an illegal $ZDTH value.

Healthy entry (note the timestamp): ^rINDEX("ABC,"INT") = $lb("2021-06-15 15:08:38.846885",) ;The second argument is sometimes present and sometimes not, likely the routine size.

Unhealthy entry (note an empty timestamp): ^rINDEX("DEF,"INT") = $lb("",21)

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We are constantly running into issues where there are billions of Orphaned messages in our system that cause problems, and we have to manually run a cleanup to fix performance issues.

In the following article about orphaned messages... https://community.intersystems.com/post/ensemble-orphaned-messages it mentions either programmatically eliminating the Orphaned messages or using a Utility like Demo.Util.CleanupSet in ENSDEMO.

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We recently moved from using the Private Web Server, to using an Apache/Web Gateway setup and moved towards using the built in LDAP functionality within IRIS. Since then, we have 1 user that uses VSCode (/api/atelier) heavily that continues to have issues signing into IRIS through VS Code and the /api/atelier extension.

I am trying to troubleshoot two issues..

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We're looking to create a quick and simple test to see if all firewalls are open on 1972 between a linux based web server VM and a VM running InterSystems IRIS. Does anyone have any ideas for a quick command that can be run from UNIX console that will provide confirmation that traffic is able to get to 1972 on an IRIS machine?

BTW - I don't think it makes any difference but the IRIS machine is running Windows

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Has anyone noticed weird behavior when upgrading to HealthShare Health Connect 2024.1?

Wednesday I upgraded our TEST environment from IRIS for UNIX (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86-64) 2022.1.4 (Build 812_0_22913U) [HealthConnect:3.5.0-1.m1] [HealthConnect:3.5.0-1.m1] to IRIS for UNIX (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86-64) 2024.1 (Build 267_2U) [HealthConnect:3.5.0-1.m1].

Some of our Business Processes have been throwing...

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There are often questions surrounding the ideal Apache HTTPD Web Server configuration for HealthShare. The contents of this article will outline the initial recommended web server configuration for any HealthShare product.

As a starting point, Apache HTTPD version 2.4.x (64-bit) is recommended. Earlier versions such as 2.2.x are available, however version 2.2 is not recommended for performance and scalability of HealthShare.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

If you want to run an OS executable file, command, or a program created within an InterSystems product when the InterSystems product starts, write the processing in the SYSTEM^%ZSTART routine. (The %ZSTART routine is created in the %SYS namespace).

Before you write any code in SYSTEM^%ZSTART, make sure that it works properly under all conditions.

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Hello community,

I guess this one will be easy to answer, but trial and error took me too long meanwhile, so I thought it might better to ask the experts.

I would like to get rid of %all rights for routine use at our productive environment. The things, that we have to do in routine are:

- Open productions and start / stop components
- Read messages and message logs
- Search and resend messages
- Deploy new Applications
- Edit settings and default settings
- Read database tables

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Let's say I have an InterSystems IRIS instance with 6 Namespaces:

  • Foo1
  • Foo2
  • Foo3
  • Foo4
  • Foo5
  • Bar

And the number of Foo# namespaces can increase at any time for a number of reasons. I need to ensure that they all have identical configuration globals stored in a DB called CONFIG, so I do the following in my configuration file:

[Map.%ALL]
Global_SYS=%DEFAULTDB
Global_SYS("CommonConfig")=CONFIG
Global_SYS("CommonOtherSettings")=CONFIG
Global_SourceControl=CONFIG

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