#System Administration

Why SSH ?

If you do not have direct access to the server that runs your IRIS Docker container
you still may require access to the container outside "iris session" or "WebTerminal".
With an SSH terminal (PuTTY, KiTTY,.. ) you get access inside Docker, and then, depending
on your needs you run "iris session iris" or display/manipulate files directly.

Note:

Hello developers!
I present to you the project of editors in terminal mode. The full-screen editor of routines, arrays and text files in terminal mode can be useful to you when debugging your project in docker or when your web interface is unavailable or limited for some reason.
Although this project is self-sufficient, I decided to make it as an addition to the ‘zapm’ module for the convenience of calling editor commands.

If your instance does not have a ZPM, then you can install the zapm-editor module in one line:

Hello, developers!

I would like to share the history of the project - the ZAPM shell.

As soon as ZPM was implemented, I immediately began to think about how best to use it.

And immediately faced with the desire to move more quickly between namespaces, especially when there are more than 20 of them.
I had to leave the ZPM, move to the desired namespace and re-enter the shell.
I suggested an improvement - a new "namespace" command for easier navigation.
I didn’t wait - I did it myself. And so it went. If you need it, get ready to do it yourself.

Hi All,

With this article, I would like to show you how easily and dynamically System Alerting and Monitoring (or SAM for short) can be configured. The use case could be that of a fast and agile CI/CD provisioning pipeline where you want to run your unit-tests but also stress-tests and you would want to quickly be able to see if those tests are successful or how they are stressing the systems and your application (the InterSystems IRIS backend SAM API is extendable for your APM implementation).

When you first start working with InterSystems IRIS, it’s a common practice to install a system with only a minimum level of security. You have to enter passwords fewer times and this makes it easier to work with development services and web applications when you're first getting acquainted. And, sometimes, minimal security is more convenient for deploying a developed project or solution.
And yet there comes a moment when you need to move your project out of development, into an Internet environment that’s very likely hostile, and it needs to be tested with the maximum security settings (that is, completely locked down) before being deployed to production. And that’s what we’ll discuss in this article.
For more complete coverage of DBMS security issues in InterSystems Caché, Ensemble, and IRIS, you may want to read my other article, Recommendations on installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for a production environment.
The security system in InterSystems IRIS is based on the concept of applying different security settings for different categories: users, roles, services, resources, privileges, and applications.

Users can be assigned roles. Users and roles can have privileges on resources — databases, services, and applications — with varying read, write, and use rights. Users and roles can also have SQL privileges on the SQL tables located in databases.

This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

Introduction

Despite the fact that InterSystems has long recommended using external backup tools, many users have opted to use the internal Online Backup facility, which is included in all distributions of InterSystems products (IRIS Data Platform, Caché, etc.). The reasons why are quite obvious:

Just wanted to share my Zabbix template for monitoring InterSystems IRIS on Linux servers.

It monitors irisusr (configurable) memory consumption:

I'm not saying that this is in anyway "best practices," but I'm in a peculiar situation where I need to restrict users from starting a "retired" Ensemble Production in a namespace that's been renamed. It's still an "Ensemble-activated" namespace; we need to keep it available for Ensemble Message Viewer access ... fortunately, only for a little while.

It's a bit of a hack ...

Open the Production class in Studio and add the following classmethod:

This is a self contained class that can be run from the Intersystems Task Scheduler which records peak usage details for databases and licenses built up throughout the day and retaining 30 days history.

To schedule the task to run every hour:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule()

You can also specify your own start time, stop time, and run interval:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule(startTime, stopTime, intervalMins)

Metrics are stored in ^Metrics in the namespace that the class resides in/is run from.

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.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a feature rich environment for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as a cloud offering fully capable of supporting all of InterSystems products including the latest InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. Care must be taken, as with any platform or deployment model, to ensure all aspects of an environment are considered such as performance, availability, operations, and management procedures. Specifics of each of those areas will be covered in this article.

Continuing on with providing some examples of various storage technologies and their performance profiles, this time we looked at the growing trend of leveraging internal commodity-based server storage, specifically the new HPE Cloudline 3150 Gen10 AMD processor-based single socket servers with two 3.2TB Samsung PM1725a NVMe drives.

NB. Please be advised that PKI is not intended to produce certificates for secure production systems. You should make alternate arrangements to create certificates for your productions.
NB. PKI is deprecated as of IRIS 2024.1: documentation and announcement.

In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. I did a similar post in the past for Caché, so feel free to check that out here if you are not running InterSystems IRIS. Much like the original, the goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running. Example screenshots are taken on a 2018.1.1 version of IRIS, so yours may look slightly different.