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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
· Nov 9, 2015 1m read
iFind Search Portal

A simple and rather automated search portal leveraging iFind capabilities for rich text search in 2016.1. It has simple faceting, result ranking, highlighting of search results etc and just works off any table you point it to that has an iFind index by appending ?t=MyPackage.TableName to the URL.

See also https://github.com/bdeboe/isc-iknow-ifindportal for more details and the latest version.

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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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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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In old Caché versions it was possible to create a new role based on predefined %Developer by copying it and adding some resources as needed. It was true at least from 2010.1 to 2015.1.

After upgrade from 2015.1.4 to 2017.2.1 it turned that it's only partially true now. User with a "New-Developer" role can enter Studio and open existing cls/mac/etc for editing and everything is OK unless he tries to create something new (Ctrl-N), than he gets a pop-up with %msg: <User xxx does not have enough privilege to execute stored procedure %CSP.StudioTemplateMgr_Templates>

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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:

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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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Like hardware hosts, virtual hosts in public and private clouds can develop resource bottlenecks as workloads increase. If you are using and managing InterSystems IRIS instances deployed in public or private clouds, you may have encountered a situation in which addressing performance or other issues requires increasing the capacity of an instance's host (that is, vertically scaling).

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Article
· Jul 25, 2019 1m read
Disabling an Ensemble Production

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:

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The attached code package provides a simple implementation of a web service client that utilizes the USPS Shipping API to normalize an address.

This code requires the developer to obtain a USPS Shipping API user ID which can be obtained from the USPS shipping API website. The assigned User Id can either be passed into the web service call as a parameter or can be coded as a parameter into the Request object.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

To resolve the error <PROTECT>, remove the read-only attribute of the system-wide library database (IRISLIB for InterSystems IRIS, CACHELIB for Caché/Ensemble/HealthShare (Caché-based))

Once you have finished importing the routine, remember to change it back to read-only.

[Version 2013.1 and above]
[Management Portal] > [System Administration] > [Configuration] > [System Configuration] > [Local Database] Uncheck "Mount read-only" from the database name link.

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Article
· Jun 30, 2020 3m read
Replicating Audit Log Near Real Time
Many organisations implement centralised log management systems to separate and centralise the log data in order to e.g. automate threat detection (and response) and to comply with regulatory requirements. The primary systems of interest are the various user facing applications, but increasingly also other kinds of systems including integration platforms.
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Some Usage cases

1. A deployment may consist of two high availability instances and two disaster recovery instances in a different data center.

The corresponding UAT environment could replicate this giving a total of 8 instances. How do you confirm CPF and Scheduled task alignment across ALL instances.

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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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Here in %SYS, we have already examined users, resources, and roles. Now that we know how to set all of that up, we should give it a purpose. Next we will talk about applications! As you may expect, we will see various identical class methods defined here that we have seen in the previous classes. However, some of them will have some tiny yet significant differences.

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Article
· Dec 15, 2016 1m read
Version history for the production class

Last week I was onsite with a new customer of ours, implementing Deltanji to give them control of their development and deployment cycle. One particularly satisfying part of the visit was seeing their pleasure at how their production class now records its changes over time, allowing them to quickly diff the versions and see what configuration items have been added or what settings altered. ​

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The goal of this writing was to illustrate how to restore backup before the patch would be applied. The alert notes that:

The risk can be avoided by applying journals from the beginning of the journal file that was switched to at the start of the backup, rather than accepting the default of starting from the journal marker position.

Having non-patched Caché 2015.1.4, I ran sample database backup and restore just to get where I should answer "No". Collecting journal info from the backup log:

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Article
· Feb 2, 2016 1m read
Cache' databases as UNIX sparse files

Some third party backup products may by default restore CACHE.DAT files as UNIX sparse files when there are trailing zeroes in the backup file.

The support for sparse files vary from UNIX distribution and file system types. Sparse files attempt to use file system space more efficiently when blocks allocated to the file are mostly empty similar to thin-provisioned storage. The file system transparently converts metadata representing empty blocks into "real" blocks filled with zero bytes at runtime. The application is suppose to be unaware of this conversion.

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Article
· Mar 24, 2020 2m read
BlocksExplorer map generator

I hope you already know one of my projects Cache Blocks Explorer. I've recently renamed it to Blocks Explorer.

For the recent contest, I've added a new feature, the ability to generate a static picture of any Cache or IRIS database. Like below. Where unique globals have a unique color. This is how looks like inside 9.5GB database. Where 1 pixel represents one block. By link on image you will get even bigger image, with more detalization.

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