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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.

Container Images

In this second post on containers fundamentals, we take a look at what container images are.

What is a container image?

A container image is merely a binary representation of a container.

A running container or simply a container is the runtime state of the related container image.

Please see the first post that explains what a container is.

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InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

  1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

  2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

  3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

  4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

  5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

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Article
· Sep 22, 2016 3m read
Windows write caching

(This article was reviewed in February 2021. It is still relevant to Caché-based installations and similarly applies to IRIS-based installations.)

This article discusses the Windows write caching setting which can leave systems vulnerable to data loss or corruption in the event of power loss or operating system crash. The setting is on by default in some Windows configurations.

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This text is a continuation of my article where I explained the structure a Caché database. In this article, I described the types of blocks, connections between them and their relation to globals. The article was purely theoretical. I made a project that helps visualize the block tree - and this article will explain how it works in great detail.

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Overview

Predictable storage IO performance with low latency is vital to provide scalability and reliability for your applications. This set of benchmarks is to inform users of IRIS considering deploying applications in AWS about EBS gp3 volume performance.

Summary

  • An LVM stripe can increase IOPS and throughput beyond single EBS volume performance limits.
  • An LVM stripe lowers read latency.
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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.

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Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

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Article
· Nov 8, 2016 4m read
Returning Disk Space to File Systems

This is the first article in a series discussing how to regain disk space from Caché databases at the operating system level. This introductory article discusses Caché database growth and gives an overview of various methods you can use to return unused disk space that is allocated to database files back to the file system. But before we talk about returning space to the file system, let’s first review how does it get allocated in the first place.

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C:\data\backup.bat :

C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\bin\cache -s"C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\Mgr" -U%%SYS ##Class(Backup.General).ExternalFreeze() <C:\data\login.scr

echo %ERRORLEVEL%

rem note that we need to check errorlevel from highest to lowest here....

if errorlevel 5 goto OK

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD

In the first article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

I this article we'll discuss:

  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • Connecting your environments to GitLab
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Hi,

Please let me know best way to restore single cache database of 300 GB from one server to another with minimum downtime.

Cold backup will take lot of time for 300 GB database size and snapshot backup not possible.

Not sure about cache online backup which take all databases backup.

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This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

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Hello everyone,

I'm trying to authenticate a user(Health Share clinician) from a Java Application.

I 'm already connected to Caché and able to run SQL commands.

My question is: How can I authenticate a user using only SQL? In fact, what I want is verify if the users exists in the base and if the given password is the same used in Health Share.

There is a column 'password' in Security.users table but I'm not able to see its content, even so, I don't know which hash function to use to compare with.

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Problem:

A file-based business service uses a local path on a Linux machine that is actually a mounted CIFS share. The mount is "soft" and is designed to not cache data, etc. There are times however when the remote system offering up the share (it's a Windows machine I believe) gets bounced or otherwise hung up the business service in the Ensemble production just hangs.

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I use DataGrip (JDBC client) to query Caché server via JDBC.

The problem I encountered, is that if I wait 10 or more minutes between queries I get an error:

[08S01][461] Communication link failure: Socket closed

To fix that I need to disconnect and connect to server again. Is there a JDBC timeout setting somewhere I can change?

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Article
· May 26, 2016 1m read
Windows, Caché and virus scanners

I have seen a customer problem recently where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché databases was causing intermittent application slow downs and bad user response times.

This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché components from your virus scanning.

Generally virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT database files and Caché binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning CACHE.DATs and InterSystems files then system performance will be significantly impacted.

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Article
· Jun 12, 2017 1m read
Setting the Windows service account

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.

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Importance and Collection of Exact Version Information ($zv / $zversion)
The explanation of:
- why collecting $zv is important (The WHY),
- what the components of $zv mean (The WHAT),
- and how to collect $zv (The HOW).
(The Ultimate $zv Guide to the ISC Galaxy in large, friendly letters)
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