Announcement
· Jan 19, 2017
Caché WebTerminal v4 Release

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
· 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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I am working with a client to try and export a set of tasks defined in the Task Manager from one system to another. I am not seeing any API for this. I can query this information in SQL. So I tried to use the Data Export Wizard from the System Management portal in the SQL window. Export was fine. Importing failed with a "can't insert into read only field" error. Looking at the class definition does not help since the implementation details are not visible.

So how would one accomplish this? Export scheduled tasks from one system to another?

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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 :)

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Article
· Jan 31, 2018 3m read
Container - What is a Container?

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

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We're looking to create a quick and simple test to see if all firewalls are open on 1972 between a linux based web server VM and a VM running InterSystems IRIS. Does anyone have any ideas for a quick command that can be run from UNIX console that will provide confirmation that traffic is able to get to 1972 on an IRIS machine?

BTW - I don't think it makes any difference but the IRIS machine is running Windows

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I'm working on a proposal for a deployment tool development project and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with such a thing.

We use Healthshare and implementations for new clients are tedius and lengthy. Lots of ensemble service, registry value, lookup tables, namespaces and other things have to be created and configured.

I would like to create a Zen or CSP page based deployment tool that can do all this with a few parameters and some custom code.

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Article
· Feb 13, 2017 14m read
Creating custom SNMP OIDs

This post is dedicated to the task of monitoring a Caché instance using SNMP. Some users of Caché are probably doing it already in some way or another. Monitoring via SNMP has been supported by the standard Caché package for a long time now, but not all the necessary parameters are available “out of the box”. For example, it would be nice to monitor the number of CSP sessions, get detailed information about the use of the license, particular KPI’s of the system being used and such. After reading this article, you will know how to add your parameters to Caché monitoring using SNMP.

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Currently, we are utilizing batch jobs at the OS level to kick off routines that watch for files. We are trying to convert these processes to be performed by the Task Manager.

The routines have while loops and perform while loops so long as the time parameters are being met.

What's the best way to ensure Task Manager kicks them off after the completion of the shutdown/backup/start process is performed, which we do nightly? I want to ensure that it starts it regardless of the time that we've set.

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Your application is deployed and everything is running fine. Great, hi-five! Then out of the blue the phone starts to ring off the hook – it’s users complaining that the application is sometimes ‘slow’. But what does that mean? Sometimes? What tools do you have and what statistics should you be looking at to find and resolve this slowness? Is your system infrastructure up to the task of the user load? What infrastructure design questions should you have asked before you went into production? How can you capacity plan for new hardware with confidence and without over-spec'ing? How can you stop the phone ringing? How could you have stopped it ringing in the first place?

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I need to develop a tool to help to get what data is being consumed by a certain process, in order to get all data used to build an automated test scenario.

For example, some user process will pull data from ^GLOBAL(1)="dataString", ^GLOBAL(2)="dataString2", ^GLOBAL1(1)="data1String", ^GLOBAL2(4)="data2String4". Amidst all other data on these Globals, I will ignore everything that was not used in the user process, and get the specific keys used on it.

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++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

Network traffic management appliances such as load balancers (physical or virtual) can be used to achieve the same level of transparency, presenting a single address to the client applications or devices. The network traffic manager automatically redirects clients to the current mirror primary’s real IP address. The automation is intended to meet the needs of both HA failover and DR promotion following a disaster.

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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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(I wasn't able to find this in the docs or the Community, so feel free to point me to a reference that I missed)

How can I determine the effective User and Group that will be used when an InterSystems IRIS process is doing file I/O on the file system for UNIX? Bonus points if you can tell me how to do it from within InterSystems IRIS as well as from the host OS.

Thanks!

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In the last post we scheduled 24-hour collections of performance metrics using pButtons. In this post we are going to be looking at a few of the key metrics that are being collected and how they relate to the underlying system hardware. We will also start to explore the relationship between Caché (or any of the InterSystems Data Platforms) metrics and system metrics. And how you can use these metrics to understand the daily beat rate of your systems and diagnose performance problems.

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Hi,

We have Mirroring established between NODE 1 & Node 2 . We have set the "cachesys" database enabled for Journalling. But we dont see the User Accounts , Roles, Resources created on Node 1 ( favoured Primary) reflected on Node 2 . Is creating them manually again is the only option for this ? . Is there any way to sync them or would adding %SYS to MIRROR a possible solution. Would it be great if anyone has faced this as we have an issue that during failovers Team is locked out .

Best Regards,

Arun Madhan

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