#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.

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
· Jun 21, 2016 1m read
Simple Cache systemd Unit

Hello

I have noticed that Cache (2016.1 at the time of writing) doesn't come with a systemd startup script for RHEL7.

Here is a small example script I have built.

[Unit]
Description=Intersystems Cache

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c '/usr/cachesys/cstart 2>&1 | logger -t cache_start'
ExecStop=/bin/bash -c '/usr/cachesys/cstop quietly 2>&1 | logger -t cache_stop'
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The file should be placed as /usr/lib/systemd/system/cache.service

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Article
· Jul 12, 2019 2m read
Basic Database Metrics example

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.

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I wanted to write it as a comment to article of @Evgeny Shvarov . But it happens to be so long, so, decided to post it separately.

Image result for docker clean all images

I would like to add a bit of clarification about how docker uses disk space and how to clean it. I use macOS, so, everything below, is mostly for macOS, but docker commands suit any platform.

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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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This post provides useful links and an overview of best practice configuration for low latency storage IO by creating LVM Physical Extent (PE) stripes for database disks on InterSystems Data Platforms; InterSystems IRIS, Caché, and Ensemble.

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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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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.

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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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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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I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

  • Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
  • Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
  • Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

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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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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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GA releases are now available for the first version (v1.0) of InterSystems System Alerting and Monitoring (InterSystems SAM for short)

InterSystems SAM v1.0 provides a modern monitoring solution for InterSystems IRIS based products. It allows high-level views of clusters and single-node drilled down metrics-visualization together with alerts notifications. This first version provides visualization for more than one hundred InterSystems IRIS kernel metrics, and users can extend the default-supplied Grafana template to their liking.

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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 you install an IRIS or Caché instance on Windows Server, you'll usually need to install it under a specific user account that has network access permissions. This is very handy when you needs to access network resources for creating files or directly accessing printers.

TL;DR: see key takeaways at the bottom!

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

If the system does not stop for 24 hours, old journal files will be deleted at 0:30 according to the "Journal file deletion settings".

A possible cause of journal files remaining that are older than the "Journal file deletion settings" is that there are transactions that remain open.

In that case, you will be able to delete the journal file by searching for processes executing transactions and finalizing the transactions.

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Get certified on InterSystems IRIS System Administration!

Hello Community,

After beta testing the new InterSystems IRIS System Administration Specialist exam, the Certification Team of InterSystems Learning Services has performed the necessary calibration and adjustments to release it to our community. It is now ready for purchase and scheduling in the InterSystems certification exam catalog. Potential candidates can review the exam topics and the practice questions to help orient them to exam question approaches and content. Passing the exam allows you to claim an electronic certification badge that can be embedded in social media accounts such as Linkedin.

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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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