Good morning everyone,
In the facility we're working in, we have two separate installations for testing and production. In the test environment, we have production processes running properly, and we need to replicate production processes and settings in the production environment. Until now, when we move from a test environment to a production environment, we currently export the test classes, import them into production, and manually configure the production environment by connecting Services, Processes, and Operations and configuring the settings.

Optimizing Performance of Apache Web Server and Web Gateway

By Patrick Jamieson, M.D., Product Technical Manager, InterSystems IRIS for Health

When working with InterSystems IRIS or IRIS for Health, an external web server like Apache2 or NGINX is essential for managing HTTP workloads, especially for FHIR servers Starting with version 2023.3, the private Apache server was removed from the installation kit (except for Community Editions and Health Connect).

Is it possible to audit code changes in a namespace?

Ideally what we'd like to be able to do is check which classes were compiled (or deleted) in a time period, eg in last 3 months, and which user made those changes. Even better would be an audit of what those changes were, but that's less important (for us, as we can probably find that information in other ways).

We have a service where 3 groups, each with multiple users, potentially have access to make changes to the live service. With the best will in the world, each group doesn't always tell every other group about changes made.

I have created a New Database/Namespace within our TEST environment on both the Primary and Backup of the mirror. When I go to create the database/namespace on the DR node I am getting "Cannot open file '/ensemble/TEST/iris.cpf_...." while the cpf file that it references does not exist. Anyone have any clue to why this might be happening?

I have a Task that I am trying to write the output to a file. How do I check for if the Output File has been included in the Task Schedule, so I can direct my output of my class to that output file?

Thanks

Scott

InterSystems FAQ rubric

To enable Interoperability functionality after creating a namespace, use the EnableNamespace method of the %EnsembleMgr class:

do ##class(%EnsembleMgr).EnableNamespace()

We are attempting to setup an EnsLib.SOAP.OutboundAdapter to send an HL7 message to a vendor hosted AWS site. We have the Certificate from the vendor and defined the TLS setting. However, when we are sending the message we are receiving...

Unable to open TCP/IP socket to server hcis-staging.cbord.com:443

So, we figured it might be a firewall issue. With the TCP Outbound Adapter, we could specify which "Local Interface" to use so that our firewall knew to use the VIP that had has been NAT'd. I don't see this option with the EnsLib.SOAP.

I am trying to log in to the Web Gateway Management and I have missed placed the password to access the system I have tried 

changing the password under local settings in the CSP.ini  and that has managed to change the password to access the gateway but cannot log me into the management area I have followed a post here and read here and I seem not to get the answers that actual explain how I can get to the web gateway management.

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.

It turned out that their original 2015.

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.

Once upon a time in Ensemble Management Portal the pool size of each component (Business Host) within the production was displayed in the Production Configuration page.

This information was very useful, especially when a production have tens or hundreds of components.

Now days the pool size is no longer displayed in the Production Configuration page and to get the pool size you need to click in each and every host in your production.
What if you have hundreds of business hosts and you need to check the pool size of each? It's a nightmare!

I have two instances of IRIS, one is Production and another one is Staging (both managed by Docker) and I want to set up a full daily recover of the Staging server from a full backup of the Production server. I know how to do this manually using the DBREST utility, as well as how to make a copy of the database by making a full copy of the durable directory (however this option requires a full stop of the Production-database). What is the best way to automatically restore all databases from a full backup using scripting?

I have created a class file that I want to execute daily to gather Metrics (Message Header, Space Available, etc..) and write the data into a Cache table. Now that I have written the class I want to add it to the Task Scheduler within Ensemble to run every morning. How do I go about getting the class file created as a Task within the Task Scheduler? The Documentation isn't as clear cut for creating custom tasks as one would expect.

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.

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 :)

In this post, I show strategies for backing up InterSystems IRIS using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot-based solutions. Most solutions I see today are deployed on Linux on VMware, so a lot of the post shows how solutions integrate VMware snapshot technology as examples.

In a containerized environment, you can manage your container time via the TZ variable or via the /etc/timezone and /etc/localtime directories:

environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Paris

volumes:
    - "/etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro"
    - "/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro"

You can find complete examples here:

IRIS Community

IRISHealth_Community

IRIS production

IRISHealth production

Hi,

I recently had a company-enforced OS upgrade, and ever since going from mac OS 14.x to 15.x, I am currently having issues with SSL in IRIS.

An ARM (M3 pro) machine running OS 15.2, with the latest Docker Desktop (at the time of writing, 4.37.0). The Docker container runs IRIS for UNIX (Ubuntu Server LTS for x86-64 Containers) 2022.1.2 (Build 574_0_22161U). This container has not changed.

When attempting to run some local API tests of our software, I am hosting a Wiremock (https://github.com/wiremock/wiremock) server locally on the mac, in order to mock HTTP requests/responses.

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.

Hello,

I was just trying to get to the bottom of a TLS config - we have an interface with a TLS config that has had 'Server certificate verification' set to 'On', however the cert file specified either did not exist or contained a cert that was expired.

Does anyone know what the behavior is for this typically? I would expect this to not allow traffic on the interface, however this has been working fine for a few years now with an invalid cert specified for 'Server certificate verification' and set to 'On'.

Hi,

In a customer project we started enforcing the "Inactivity Limit" as defined in System-Wide Security Parameters. The customer would expect accounts to become Disabled after they have been inactive for the specified amount of days. However, that doesn't happen; it seems the Inactivity Limit is only established after logging in.

Furthermore, the account inactivity only starts being applied after the first login. Can you confirm that?

I am developing locally on my IRIS instance using VSCode and client-side editing approach. How can I automatically export a single .cls file/a whole package to a remote TEST/PREPROD server using a script or command line and recompile the unit remotely? Are there any more simple and straightforward ways than CI/CD explained in the series of articles by Eduard?

InterSystems FAQ rubric

It can be obtained with a List query of the %SYS.Namespace class.

1. Create a routine like this:

getnsp
   set statement=##class(%SQL.Statement).%New()
   set status=statement.%PrepareClassQuery("%SYS.Namespace","List")
   set resultset=statement.%Execute()
   while resultset.%Next() {
       write resultset.%Get("Nsp"),!
   }
   quit

2. Run it in your terminal

The method of executing class queries introduced in this article can be applied in a variety of cases.

You can see various class queries in the class reference.

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)

InterSystems FAQ rubric

The maximum number of namespaces that can be created in one instance is 2047. However, to use a large number of namespaces, you will need to configure memory accordingly.

The maximum number of databases (including remote databases) that can be created in one instance is 15998. Depending on the type of license, there may be restrictions on the number that can be created. For details, please refer to the following document.
Database Configuration [IRIS]
Database Configuration
 

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

ERROR <Ens>ErrOutConnectionLost: Lost HL7 Read connection to 10.101.87.

Hi Community!

Suppose you have a working system on 8-bit Caché database and need to transfer the solution to Unicode database.

How do you manage that?

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.

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.

Every modification to a journaled database (sets and kills) is recorded with its timestamp in a journal file. This runs in parallel with writes to the databases and the write image journal (WIJ) for redundancy.

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?

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

[Unit]
Description=InterSystems IRIS Data Platform
After=network.