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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.

Article
· Jun 12, 2017 1m read
Setting the Windows service account

I recently helped a site investigate a problem that appeared after they upgraded their Windows instance of Caché from 2015.1 to 2017.1. A terminal session launched from the server's desktop cube was unable to run OS-level commands using the $ZF(-1) function. For instance, using the no-op command "REM" as follows:

write $zf(-1,"rem")

was returning -1, indicating that the Windows command could not be issued.

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Introduction

This is a quickstart guide to IRIS for Linux systems administrators who need to be able to support the IRIS DB as well as other normal infrastructure tasks.

IRIS is a DB system from Intersystems. An IRIS DB can hold code (in the form of a Class) or data (in the form of Globals). IRIS DB are Linux files called IRIS.DAT.

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Monitoring your IRIS deployment is crucial. With the deprecation of System Alert and Monitoring (SAM), a modern, scalable solution is necessary for real-time insights, early issue detection, and operational efficiency. This guide covers setting up Prometheus and Grafana in Kubernetes to monitor InterSystems IRIS effectively.

This guide assumes you already have an IRIS cluster deployed using the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO), which simplifies deployment, integration and mangement.

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So, you checked your server and saw that IRISTEMP is growing too much. There's no need to panic. Let’s investigate the issue before your storage runs out.

Step 1: Confirm the IRISTEMP Growth Issue

Before assuming IRISTEMP is the problem, let’s check its actual size.

Check the Free Space

Run the following command in the IRIS terminal:

%SYS>do ^%FREECNT

When prompted, enter:

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Hi beloved members of the Community!

It is very common in the daily life of IRIS or Health Connect users that it is necessary to install new instances or update the ones they already have and in many cases it is not these same users who carry out the installation, but rather systems personnel who often do not take into account the particularities of the assignment of permissions necessary for the installation.

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Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

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In this tutorial, I will discuss how can you connect your IRIS data platform to sql server db .

Prereq:

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Article
· May 24, 2024 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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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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Article
· Jul 8, 2024 2m read
Configuring IRIS autostart on Linux

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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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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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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[Background]

InterSystems IRIS family has a nice utility ^SystemPerformance (as known as ^pButtons in Caché and Ensemble) which outputs the database performance information into a readable HTML file. When you run ^SystemPerformance on IRIS for Windows, a HTML file is created where both our own performance log mgstat and Windows performance log are included.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

If the journal file is too large to be searched or filtered using the Management Portal, you can refer to it using the following two methods.

① How to use the ^JRNDUMP utility
② How to reference it in a program

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