#System Administration

8 Followers · 546 Posts

System administration refers to the management of one or more hardware and software systems.

Documentation on InterSystems system administration.

Question Ben Spead · Oct 8, 2021

I have been reviewing the details on the CPF Merge functionality offered in IRIS:

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cl…

I love the frequent mentions of versioning the CPF merge files in Source control.  One thing that is not yet clear to me is how this would work for rolling back a change:

"That way, assuming you version and store the merge files you employ, you can maintain a record of the configuration of each instance through time, enabling rollback if required, and avoid the possibility of configuration merge overwriting changes made by other means"

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Article Murray Oldfield · May 22, 2018 9m read

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 Dmitry Maslennikov · Jul 13, 2019 6m read

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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Question Augusto Estefan · Sep 1, 2021

Hello, 

The database is increasing a lot (almost a 1TB) and getting bigger with no sense after migration, the use of the plataform did not increase after the migration so is strange for us this increase.

how can I check everything is ok in the database? for example any table getting bigger.

Before the migration the logs were like:

07/22/21-17:18:26:304 (19701) 0 Starting Expansion for database /opt/Intersystems/HS/HS_201521705/mgr/cachetemp/. 276 MB requested.

07/22/21-17:18:26:373 (19701) 0 Expansion completed for database /opt/Intersystems/HS/HS_201521705/mgr/cachetemp/. Expanded by 276 MB.

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Question Augusto Estefan · Aug 18, 2021

Hello,

We need to upgrade our cache instance from 2016.2 to the latest version.

I find the documentation about the "Upgrade Path" but I cant  find where I can get the files to upgrade in the documentation.

Also I cant find how to make this upgrade, they talk about strategies but dont talk how to perform the task to upgrade.

Is there any documentation of how to make and upgrade and where I can get the files?

We have the instance installed on RedHat unix. 

Thanks!! 

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Question Mike Dawson · Jun 8, 2021

We need to upgrade from Healthshare 2016.2 to HealthConnect latest but we are too far behind the current version to do an upgrade in situ.

So I need to create a new instance of HealthConnect and the copy across all the database definitions, namespaces and classes.

I know its possible to script this stuff and pull all the definitions out of the old Healthshare system and then apply them to the new HealthConnect instance.

Has anyone done anything like this before that they would be happy to share with me so I could use it as a starting point rather than re-invent the wheel again?

Regards

MikeD

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Announcement Nikita Savchenko · Jan 19, 2017

Greetings, InterSystems community!

I am pleased to announce that the web terminal project, Caché WebTerminal version 4 gets its release! After long period of enhancing this web application from 2013, it came to the version 4, which features major stability and security improvements, intelligent autocomplete and syntax highlighting, convenient SQL mode and a lot of other useful features.

The goal of this article is to spread the knowledge about this project over the InterSystems community.

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Article Erik Hemdal · Oct 31, 2016 8m read

Here are a few examples of conversions and operations you might need, along with links to documentation where you can learn more.

At the time I wrote this, Eastern Daylight Time was in effect for my Caché system.

How Caché keeps the time and date

Caché has a simple time format, with a longer range of recognized dates compared to some other technologies.

The current time is maintained in a special variable $HOROLOG ($H):

USER>WRITE $H64146,54027USER>

The first integer is the count of days since December 31, 1840. The second integer is the count of seconds since midnight of the current day.

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Article Jose-Tomas Salvador · Apr 8, 2020 6m read

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...

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Article Robert Cemper · Apr 26, 2021 3m read

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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Article Bob Binstock · Apr 26, 2021 9m read

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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Question Fábio Campos · Apr 27, 2021

Hello everyone!

Some time ago, I changed the configuration in SQL Runtime Statistic to "Turn on Stats code generation to gather stats at the Open and Close of a query". With this change, the CACHE base (cache/mgr/cache/) has grown a lot to reach 198GB.

Yesterday, I returned the configuration of SQL Runtime Statistic to the default which is "Turn off Stats code generation" and the cache base is no longer growing.

My question is?

How to delete this data that was created in the CACHE base (cache/mgr/cache/) and what data I can delete without affecting the system.

Thanks,
Fábio Louly.

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Article Sergey Mikhailenko · Apr 20, 2021 4m read

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:

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Question Anzelem Sanyatwe · Apr 17, 2021

We are seeing more and more customers being lured with latest infrastructure technologies, particularly Composable Infrastructure. Coming with all sorts of data center consolidations and costs savings.

Question is: are there any concerns for HealthShare/TrakCare being run on these platforms or things to look out for? Anyone out there, already on these platforms?

To be more specific this is HPe Synergy with 480 Compute blades booting as bare metal.

Regards;

Anzelem.

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Article Sergey Mikhailenko · Apr 16, 2021 7m read

When you have more than ten thousand users in your database, it becomes time-consuming and inconvenient to assign group access rights through the standard IRIS interface. In this artilce I want to introduce you an application to automate this process.

I’ll show you how to assign and change the role lists for the users, selecting them by context, and I will also show you how to expand this application’s functionality. you know how to apply your work as an administrator and developer to the new features of the well-proven apptools software complex. With the addition of an adminLTE template, you can now quickly and easily create interface interactions for any entity and many functional modules. The goal while developing this toolkit is to write as little JavaScript as possible as well as transfer and implement all the dynamics as much as possible in the ObjectScript.

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Question Alexey Maslov · Feb 6, 2021

During some consulting activity, I found at the client's site CACHEAUDIT database of more than 100 GB size. The reason was simple: several processes produced a great amount of %System/%System/OSCommand audit records due to frequent external calls ($zf(-100,...)). As it is well-known, those events can be easily disabled systemwide, while this can be hardly considered secure enough. Reducing the number of days before audit cleanup from default 62 to some reasonable figure (e.g. 15) seems to be a better solution, but...

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Question Joshua Feener · Mar 3, 2021

Getting this error when starting up Caché: 


I've recently deleted several Caché namespaces to clear up space, turned Caché off, and then this started happening. Caché cube is grey, but only the start Caché option is unavailable. 

Caché is still running, but just not completely:

 

The Windows Event Viewer application has the following error: 

There are also the following logs in the mgr/cconsole.log file. I can provide more if necessary. 

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Question Scott Roth · Feb 4, 2021

We are getting more and more request wondering if we could send/receive data via HTTPS to the outside world from within our Hospital Network. As you can imagine our Ensemble/Cache productions are not exposed to the DMZ or has access outside of the network. We only communicate with external vendors through a VPN, so communicating not using a VPN is rather new to us.

Currently there is a project to get rid of using Proxy, and instead of through a Load Balancer that can use rules to filter out traffic, which adds another layer of complexity.

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Article Sergey Mikhailenko · Jan 25, 2021 2m read

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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Article Ray Fucillo · Sep 2, 2020 7m read

While the integrity of Caché and InterSystems IRIS databases is completely protected from the consequences of system failure, physical storage devices do fail in ways that corrupt the data they store.  For that reason, many sites choose to run regular database integrity checks, particularly in coordination with backups to validate that a given backup could be relied upon in a disaster.  Integrity check may also be acutely needed by the system administrator in response to a disaster involving storage corruption.  Integrity check must read every block of the globals being checked (if not already

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Question Ahmad Bukhtiar · Dec 5, 2020

Hi, we suddenly noticed that one of the edge storage increased by 30% and it was due to ERROR globals which was throwing repeated error for 7 days and it consumed 35GB space. Is there a way to log the storage of edge production on daily basis and compare the increase in storage with previous day and if increase is 5% more than trigger an email to system admit to look why the storage increased suddenly. 

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Question Mikhail Akselrod · Nov 11, 2020

Hi,

Please, advise how to programmatically set "System Mode" value.

Manually this value can be set via Management Portal > System > Configuration > Memory and Startup > System Mode dropdown.

Value can be programmatically obtained via $SYSTEM.Version.SystemMode() , but  I couldn't  find a programmatical way to set it.

Thank you.

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Article Mikhail Khomenko · May 15, 2017 12m read

Prometheus is one of the monitoring systems adapted for collecting time series data.

Its installation and initial configuration are relatively easy. The system has a built-in graphic subsystem called PromDashfor visualizing data, but developers recommend using a free third-party product called Grafana. Prometheus can monitor a lot of things (hardware, containers, various DBMS's), but in this article, I would like to take a look at the monitoring of a Caché instance (to be exact, it will be an Ensemble instance, but the metrics will be from Caché). If you are interested – read along.

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Question Mikhail Khomenko · Oct 30, 2016

Good day! Is there an opportunity to debug the ISCAgent behaviour (in Linux)? ISCAgent uses /etc/iscagent/iscagent.conf as configuration file, but in docs I've found a description only for two parameters (port number and interface - http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GHA_mirror#GHA_mirror_set_agent). Other parameters I can see by running /usr/local/etc/cachesys/ISCAgentCtrl status:

application_server.interface_address=*
application_server.port=2188
daemonized=yes
mirroring=on
pid=41850
running=yes
version=2015.2.0.664.3
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