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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.

This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

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· May 26, 2016 1m read
Windows, Caché and virus scanners

I have seen a customer problem recently where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché databases was causing intermittent application slow downs and bad user response times.

This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché components from your virus scanning.

Generally virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT database files and Caché binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning CACHE.DATs and InterSystems files then system performance will be significantly impacted.

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· 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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Importance and Collection of Exact Version Information ($zv / $zversion)
The explanation of:
- why collecting $zv is important (The WHY),
- what the components of $zv mean (The WHAT),
- and how to collect $zv (The HOW).
(The Ultimate $zv Guide to the ISC Galaxy in large, friendly letters)
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth? Certainly more than typing a post.

Please check out my "Coding talks" on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

1. Analysing InterSystems IRIS System Performance with Yape. Part 1: Installing Yape

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3KClL5zT6MY
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Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cuMLSO9NQCM
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Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

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A short post for now to answer a question that came up. In post two of this series I included graphs of performance data extracted from pButtons. I was asked off-line if there is a quicker way than cut/paste to extract metrics for mgstat etc from a pButtons .html file for easy charting in Excel.

See: - Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected

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· Aug 26, 2016 8m read
Enterprise Monitor and HealthShare

Enterprise Monitor is a component of Ensemble and can help organizations monitor multiple productions running on different namespaces within the same instance or namespaces running on multiple instances.

Documentation can be found at:

http://docs.intersystems.com/ens20161/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=EMONITOR_all#EMONITOR_enterprise

In Ensemble 2016.1 there were changes made to make this utility work with HealthShare environments.

This article will:

  • Show how to set up Enterprise Monitor for HealthShare sites
  • Show some features of Enterprise Monitor
  • Show some features of Enterprise Message Viewer

For this article, I used the following version of HealthShare:

Cache for Windows (x86-64) 2016.1 (Build 656U) Fri Mar 11 2016 17:42:42 EST [HealthShare Modules:Core:14.02.2415 + Linkage Engine:14.02.2415 + Patient Index:14.02.2415 + Clinical Viewer:14.02.2415 + Active Analytics:14.02.2415]

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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.

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System Monitor is a flexible and highly configurable tool supplied with Caché (Ensemble, HealthShare), which collects the essential metrics of the operating system and Caché itself. System Monitor also notifies administrators about issues with Caché and the operating system, when one or several parameters reach the admin-defined thresholds.

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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.

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Pouring The Coffee: Creating and scheduling a task

Don't you wish a fresh, hot cup of coffee could be waiting for you right when you get into the office? Let's automate that!

Cache and IRIS come with a built-in Task Manager, which should have a familiar feel to those used to using the Windows task scheduler or using cron on Linux. Your user account will need access to the %Admin_Task resource to use it, and you can access it in the management portal under System Operation -> Task Manager. When first installed, there are roughly 20 types of task that you can schedule.

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One of the topics that comes up often when managing Ensemble productions is disk space:

The database (the CACHE.DAT file) grows in a rate that was unexpected; or the Journal files build up at a fast pace; or the database grows continuously though the system has a scheduled purge of the Ensemble runtime data.

It would have been better if these kind of phenomena would have been observed and accounted for yet at the development and testing stage rather than on a live system.

For this purpose I created a basic framework that could aid in this task.

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I wanted to see some alerts that occur in my Productions in a Mobile Device, I came across Pushover.net recently that although has an upfront cost $5 you can send as many messages as you like after that, there is a 7 day free trial to check it out.

To Integrate this with a production I did the following.

Create an account and set up a device on https://pushover.net/

Record the following API Keys from the web site on the main page you will see

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Mirror Outage Procedures

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. This article provides an overview of recommended procedures for dealing with a variety of planned and unplanned mirror outage scenarios.

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· Nov 9, 2015 1m read
Cache SQL Storage Mapping

The attached zip file contains a bunch of examples of Cache SQL Storage mappings that I have done over the years.

If you have existing globals and want to expose them via Objects or SQL you need to setup Cache SQL Storage mapping. If you do not see an example that helps with your case send me an example and I can help you out.

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When running the built in Ensemble Purge task (Ens.Util.Tasks.Purge) there are three parameters DaysToKeep, BodiesToo, and KeepIntegrity. This article focuses on the KeepIntegrity boolean parameter, but more information about running this task can be found here:

http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=...

KeepIntegrity determines which Ensemble Messages are marked for deletion within the time specified by DaysToKeep.

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After reading Stephen Wilson's article "Windows 7 performs shutdown too fast for Cache to close and so it gets forced down" I've recalled another solution that was based on Local Group Policy, which allows to control extra actions that should occur on computer startup or shutdown. How to add a computer shutdown script is well documented in MS Technet article.

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Article
· Apr 26, 2021 3m read
SSH for IRIS container

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:
This is not meant to be the default access for the average application user
but the emergency backdoor for System Management, Support, and Development.

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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.

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