Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

BbWorld Presentation Redux Part I – Automation

Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers.

I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). I wrote the bit about tracking files a while back in large part because of the blank looks we got when I mentioned in our presentation at BbWorld these files exist. For many unanticipated reasons, these may not be made part of the tracking data in the database.

Automation in this context essentially is the scheduling of tasks to run without a human needing to intercede. Humans should spend time on analysis not typing commands into a shell.

Rolling Restarts

This is our internal name for restarting a subset (consisting of nodes) of our clusters. The idea is to restart all managed nodes except the JMS node, usually one at a time. Such restarts are conducted for one of two reasons: 1) have the node pick up a setting or 2) have Java discard from memory everything. The latter is why we restart the nodes once weekly.

Like many, I was skeptical of the value of restarting the nodes in the cluster once weekly. Until, as part of the Daylight Savings Time patching, we provided our nodes to our Systems folks (hardware and operating systems) and forgot to re-enable the Rolling Restarts for one batch. Those nodes starting complaining about issues into the second week. Putting back into place the Rolling Restarts eliminated the issues. So… Now I am a believer!

One of my coworkers created a script which 1) detects whether or not Vista is running on the node, 2) only if Vista is running does it shut down the node, 3) once down, it starts up the node, and 4) finally checks that it is running. Its pretty basic.

Log cleanup to preserve space

We operate on a relatively small space budget. Accumulating logs infinitum strikes us as unnecessary. So, we keep a months’ worth of logs for certain ones. Others are rolled by Log4j to keep a certain number. Certain activities can mean only a day’s worth are kept, so we have on occasion increased the number kept for diagnostics. Log4j is so easy and painless.

We use Unix’s find with mtime to look for files 30 days old with specific file names. We delete the ones which match the pattern.

UPDATE 2007-SEP-18: The axis files in /var/tmp will go on this list, but we will delete any more than a day old.

Error reporting application, tracking, vulnerabilities

Any problems we have encountered, we expect to encounter again at some point. We send ourselves reports to stay on top of potentially escalating issues. Specifically, we monitor for the unmarshalled exception for WebLogic, that tracking files failed to upload, and we used to collect instances of a known vulnerability in Vista. Now that its been patched, we are not looking for it anymore.

Thread dumps

Blackboard at some point will ask for thread dumps at the time the error occurred. Replicating a severe issue strikes us as bad for our users. We have the thread dumps running every 5 minutes and can collect them to provide Blackboard on demand. No messing with the users for us.

Sync admin node with backup

We use rsync to keep a spare admin node in sync with the admin node for each production cluster. Should the admin node fail, we have a hot spare.

LDIS batch integration

Because we do not run a single cluster per school and the Luminis Data Integration Suite does not work with multiple schools for Vista 3 (rumor is Utah has it working for Vista 4), we have to import our Banner data in batches. The schools we host send the files, our expert reviews the files and puts them in place. A script finds the files and uploads each in turn. Our expert can sleep at night.

Very soon, we will automate the running of the table analysis.

Anyone have ideas on what we should automate?

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One response to “BbWorld Presentation Redux Part I – Automation”

  1. […] one covered automation of Blackboard Vista 3 tasks. Next, let’s look at […]

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