System Administration



[System Administration]

version 7.x

[Module Objectives]

We will cover in detail the items needed by a system administrator. Many of these commands are database commands rather than Pro:Man commands. As such, you may want to review your D3 manual for more details on these topics

CONTENTS PAGE

Section I. System Setup and Maintenance

Your D3 service 3

Device Manager 6

File Manager 11

PRINTERS 17

SPOOLER commands 24

BACKUPS 24

User Maintenance 32

Checking system related phantoms 33

How to properly shutdown your system

and your UPS 34

Night Time Processor 34

Sync 36

Section II. User Setup

USERS_MAINT 1

PROFILES_MAINT 3

PDM_ACC_MAINT 6

PIB_MAINT 8

PDM_FUNC_KEY_MAINT 9

RESET_PASSWORD 13

CONTENTS PAGE

Section III. Security

CREATE-ACCOUNT 2

PDM_MAINT 5

UPDATE_ACCT_MENU 9

FS_UPDATE 15

TRX_LOG_RPT 13

Section IV. Reference Sheets

Tape Backup Log Sheets

Check-off Sheet for new users

Incident Report

Flow chart for Primary System Set-Up

Flow chart for Add New User(s)

Flow chart for Updating Existing User

Flow chart for Deleting a User

Flow chart for Renaming a User(s)

System Setup and Maintenance

This section covers how to set up your D3 system and how to maintain it. This should be performed by your system administrator only.

Services

D3 is now a service under Windows 2003/2008. This means that you need to set some parameters for your service. The services manager can be found under START, SETTINGS, CONTROL PANEL, Administrative Tools, Services. After installing D3, two entries should show up in this window. These are D3 Virtual Machine Environment and D3 ODBC Server. These are shown as :

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Your D3 ODBC Server should be set to “Manual” under Startup Type. This will be started inside of D3 as shown later in the section listed below under ‘USER-COLDSTART’. You will want to set your D3 Machine Environment to be “Automatic” under most circumstances. This means that when Windwos starts, D3 will start automatically. You set this by highlighting the service, D3 Machine Environment, and right click your mouse. Highlight the “PROPERTIES” and click.

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The property dialog box will be displayed. The startup flag is in the middle of the screen with a drop down box. Set this to “automatic”. Please see the notes below regarding shutting down D3 along with a system reboot. If you are working on an Windows issue that requires a number of reboots, you may want to set this service to “manual”, so that you do not have to wait for the service to stop each time you reboot.

There is also a “Log On” tab on this screen. You will probably want to set this to log on as “administrator”. Any change made on this screen must have an identical change made to the same tab on the D3 ODBC service. The two services MUST be logged on the same way as they share memory space and they must have the same permissions.

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The D3 default for this tab is “Local System Account”. You may not have sufficient permissions to print or back up your machine, depending on how you have set up your domain. If all of the printers are defined locally, and your backup devices are on this machine, and your pseudo floppies are on this machine, and you have no other web services running, you may be able to leave this as “local system account”.

Also NOTE ! If you change the password on your administrator account, you must change the password in this tab. Otherwise, D3 will not start.

Click “APPLY” and “OK”.

If you have set the service to manual, you must highlight the service and then click the “Start” button. This screen will respond with “started” very quickly. In reality, the environment is not completely started for users to log in. This takes anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. If you open the task manager (right click on your task bar on bottom of the screen), click on the heading that says “Mem Usage”. That will sort the running services by memory usage. D3Vme.exe should be near (or at) the top of the list. The memory usage should stop counting when the service is fully functional and user can log in. Have your users wait until the service is fully functional.

D3 Device Manager

The device manager allows you to set up a number of system-related parameters. We will not provide the entire functionality for this tool, as your installer should have set some of these parameters. Our Knowledge Base contains other rarely used functionality.

All changes made in the Device Manager are registry type settings. They only take effect upon start of your D3 service. Therefore, you may make changes while D3 is running, but they will not take effect until the next time you start D3.

This tool must be run from the console of your D3/NT server. You need to click START, PROGRAMS, D3. You must then click on “Device Manager”. You should see a screen similar to the following:

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While the first tab might list printers, NEVER set your printers up on this page. See the PRINTERS section below for the proper way define and start your printers.

You should, however, start your tape devices using the second tab.

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The available tape devices are listed in the left-hand window. The number of entries will depend on the equipment in your machine, and may not match what is shown above. This machine has a “A” floppy drive. All systems have a pre-built “pseudo” tape device that allows you to use a file on your hard drive as a tape device. You must have your tape devices defined in Windows before they will show up in this window. Hence, your tape devices should be installed and configured before attempting to set them up in D3.

The right side of the screen lists devices that have been configured for use in D3. There is a maximum of 15 devices in versions of D3 prior to 7.5.5 that can be defined. In our example above, we can see that our floppy drive “A” is set as device “0”. Devices 1 and 2 will be set up by D3 automatically during the installation process and should be left alone. You are free to define all the remaining devices. In our case device 3 is our pseudo for nightly backups. If you have Tape devices in your server (and most today do not) the tape names , Tape0 and Tape1, should correspond to the tape property pages in Windows. These will be assigned by Windows automatically.

The balance of the tape devices are pseudo tape devices. They refer to files that can be used on a temporary basis to save information and then restore information back from.

To configure a new device, click on the available device in the left pane, and then click on an unused device number in the right pane.

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If you select a “pseudo” type device, you will be prompted for the file to use. You must then click the “add” button on the right side of the screen. This will look something like:

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This is the standard Windows type dialog box. You can create new directories. We suggest that you create a directory and place all your pseudos in it. These can grow quite large and if they are all in the same directory, it is quite easy to review and delete any to reclaim disk space. The pseudo file name can be any name that you like. We suggest using names that indicate what is in the pseudo. Sometimes “junk” is just that, a temporary file that is used like the TEMP directory in Windows. It could be deleted at any time and would not affect system integrity. Other times, a file called “acct_save” would indicate that some account was saved in it, and should not be deleted without careful consideration. Other creative pseudo names include monthend, yearend, fs2001_12, etc.

The file can exist or can be new. It is your choice. If it exists, the system asks “do you want to use the existing file”. You should answer “Y”. It does nothing to the information in the file when you do this. Hence, you can copy a pseudo back in from an Windows backup, create a pseudo to it, using the newly restored file name, and you will be able to read the data from it.

Any changes made on this tab will take effect the next time that you start the service. If you need a new pseudo when D3 is already running, you can see the directions below that describe making a psuedo on the fly.

The third tab should normally be left alone.

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You should not change the name on you server once you have installed D3. All of your FSI data will seem to disappear. The MDS server name in the left panel shows the machine name that D3 is expecting. If you have changed your machine name, call your Pro:Man representative and get assistance. This may very well require a call to Raining Data, so you should be on support contract with them.

The VME disk size can be of some importance. The default size, when you install your D3 database is 254 Megs. This is the working space for the database (not your actual data). Typically this can be fine. However, over time this space is not recovered from normal processes. If you ever loose power to the server, or if you log off users, space can be lost. You can safely increase this to 1 gig (as shown above) as needed. If you have problems (some described below), you will need to restore your work area (this is called DISK0 retore). There are documents on the Knowledge Base, should this ever be necessary.

Problem: users are receiving a message “out of disk space”

Answer:

Make sure that disk drive that your data is stored on has free space. You can check the properties of the drive with “my computer” or “disk management on “computer management”. If you have enough space here, the problem is most likely your work space. Log into the D3 and go to CMD_LINE, in the command box, type FREE and click process. You will then see your free space. Now you can either:

Increase your VME size (shown above), stop D3 service and restart it

or

Do a DISK0 restore

Problem: users are prompted for their user ID, once entered the system does not respond.

Answer:

stop D3 service, restart D3. If the problem persists, or it will not stop correctly, you must do a DISK0 restore

On older versions of the database, older than 7.5.0, this memory loss occurs more frequently. On older versions, the loss occurs less frequently. Typically, even with releases 7.5.x, we find that a Disk0 is required once a year.

Finally, you may elect to disable telnet port 23 from being a D3 database port. There a couple of reasons to consider this. First, security !! It is normal for someone to telnet to a server on port 23 as an industry standard. Hence, if this is disabled, they will not be able to telnet to the server and hack into it as easily. The hacker can still do a port scan and find other open ports, but it will be a bit harder. Second, you may have another service running that requires port 23. Some remote administration programs require standard telnet services. We normally suggest that you disable port 23 and “nail” all of the ports to specific users. There are a couple of reasons for this, but if you nail a port, the users will be on the same database port all the time. This will allow us to define certain parameters for that user by port.

This “nailing” of ports is done on the fourth tab. It looks like:

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Your screen may not look like this. In our case, we have skipped some “nailed” ports to allow for standard COM ports. This may be setup for a dumb terminal, or more likely a modem.

We have then nailed telnet ports “3030 through 3050” to D3 ports 30 through 50. This means that if a user telnets to the machine on port “3030”, they will always be port 30 inside of D3.

To add nailed ports, you must follow this procedure (like it or not). First highlight some available port numbers in the left pane by clicking and holding down your mouse button. Highlight as many ports as you like. This need not match the number of port that you have purchased. We typically configure more as this is the number of devices that MAY attach to the server, while your licenses are the number of people actually logged on concurrently.

With the port numbers highlighted, move the slide bar using the arrows called “Nailed Telnet Port Configuration”. You cannot enter the port number; you must slide the bar until the corresponding telnet port is displayed. You need to pick port numbers that typically are not used by other telnet services on your machine. Typically the 3000 or 4000 range is ok. You may find that this is not the case in your environment. Go back into this screen and change the telnet ports. You can use numbers up to 65000. Note that if you have installed VNC as your remote support tool, it uses ports 5800 and then 5900, 5901, etc. up to 5999. So stay away from these port numbers.

Finally, highlight anything that is shown in the “text box” on the right side, bottom of the screen. This defaults to something similar to “,,dm,dm,term j,”. This means that when the port shows up, execute and then log into the system using the DM user and then log into the DM account, using “J” terminal emulation. WE NEVER want this to happen. So always highlight this and press “delete” key.

At this point you can click on the ADD button.

There are a couple of exceptions to this format. The system has the ability to automatically open certain fastkeys (menu options) when a user logs in. However, there are times that we want the system to simply open directly to specific screen when the PC is first booted up. There is a separate document in the KB describing this setup, however, we will note the way to set this port up here.

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You may have specific ports designated to run certain fastkeys or functions.

The first high lighted port “100” is how an RF bar code gun will look like. Set your bar code gun to log into port 100 and this server for this functionality.

The next section, ports “101-104” are for time and attendance clock stations. These ports will run the clock time application automatically.

The last section, port 105, is how a port would look for a labor collection stations on the shop floor. In this case, it was for a station that only runs MST_ENTRY.

See the KB for specific directions on setting up the PC and how to set these up.

The last tab on the device manager looks like:

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You can leave all of these items alone, unless your instructed to do so by your PROMAN representative.

Click on EXIT to save your changes and close the window. You must stop the service and restart it before you can use these ports.

D3 File Manager

Typically you do not need to use this item. It is found in the same folder as the device manager discussed above. All of the features in this program can be done inside of D3 at a later time. Some people find the file sizing to be a bit easier to use in this program. It is a matter of preference. For reference sake, we will review it here.

This program will open a window similar to:

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You will need to click on the “open” folder on the toolbar. Under normal circumstances, your only VME will immediately display. If you have a rare multiple VME environment, select the machine you are looking at. Otherwise, you will immediately see our database accounts show up as shown below:

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Your accounts will be different than shown. You will have at least one account called PROMAN.

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Click the small + next to the account name. It will explode out to “synonyms” and “tables”. Your table directory contains all of your data files in this account. Click the + next to the tables to see your files. With “Tables” highlighted, right click on it. You will see a dialog box pop up. The last entry in that box is “check overflow” Click on that. The system will respond immediately by flashing through each file. When all of the files have been reviewed (less than 60 seconds on most machines), you will see a new dialog box, similar to this:

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These files are items that the system thinks need review. Do not bother with “bp” type files nor any “pam” items. These cannot be sized according to this scheme. They will be fine the way they are currently sized and offer no significant system performance increases. Other data files can help though. The theory of resizing files to optimum performance varies. With machines these days being what they are, it is better to oversize the file than undersize. However, ridiculous file sizes hurt performance as well. So it is better to size them approximately correct and then leave some room for growth (if the file typically grows). There are documents on the Knowledge Base covering some of these theories. Once, we have a plan on how we might want to size the file, we highlight it in the list and a new window appears:

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This window simply tells us what the file is and where it is located. You should NEVER attempt to change any of that information. We are only interested in the Modulo (9 in our case). The other tabs “Usage” and “Statistics” may be interesting information, but is of no real use at the present time. You can do this process even if users are in the file currently.

We suggest that you click on the “Hash” button. You will see a new window with a graph shown, which will look something like:

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This is a graphical representation of how your data is distributed in the allocated space. In our case above, the system has to read two clusters (or frames) on several of the cases. This is twice as much work as it should be. We need to remember that this will never be perfect. So don’t try. Get it close.

In this case, we will try a new Modulo (amount of space allocated for this file) of say 23. We enter this on the upper right side of the screen and then click on “TEST”. It will re-display the data distribution as shown:

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Leave the “prime only” button clicked all the time. You can select a different “file sample size” to less than 100 so that the re-display works faster, but this only takes a few seconds anyway. As an alternate, we could have checked “Max fill ration %” and ask that all of the allocated space only be a “% filled”. This is a different approach. Once the correct or preferred size is determined, click on the “resize” button. Yet another window will appear as shown:

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Click on the “START” button. In most cases, this will be nearly instantaneous. On larger files, it may take a few seconds. You can click on the “CLOSE” button at this point.

You will be taken back to the previous window. Click on the CLOSE button on the bottom right side.

You will be taken back to the file property window. This WILL have old information on it. This is perfectly OK. Just click on OK and close this window. Again, you will be back at the file list window. This will have the old information in it again. Proceed to the next file and continue until all the files have been reviewed. If you click on the “REFRESH” button, your updated file size will be displayed.

Click on “CLOSE” when you are fished.

You will be taken back to the first window that shows your accounts and tables (files). You can now close this window.

See the Knowledge Base for additional information on file sizing and system performance.

Printers

We suggest that you set your printers up in D3 after the environment is started. The primary reason for this is that we cannot control windows on how it starts services. Since starting the printers in D3 rely on the Windows spooler printer definitions being created and the shares being available, we must know that they are there. By putting this inside D3, we can assume that the other services will start before the fairly slow D3 VME.

To create printers, put an item in your DM account, master dictionary called USER-COLDSTART. This item will be run every time D3 starts up. A sample of this is shown below:

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We assume that you can use the EDitor or the UProcessor to create such an item. Typically, this item would be created by your PROMAN representative, when they initially install your system. In the case above, we have several items being started. We are interested in only line 3 for the moment. With this reference, we must have an additional item in the MD of our DM account called PRINTERS. This should look something like:

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The first line must be a “N”…. Always. After that the lines go in pairs. Lines 2 and 3 define printer “15”, lines 4 and 5 define printer 16, etc.

You do not have to manually make this item. It will be made for you in a fastkey called QUEUE_SETUPS_MAINT. For reference, we offer the following so that you know what that fastkey is doing. You can manually manipulate this item, if needed.

The first of the two lines defines a device. The syntax is always the same except for the device number (after the –n) and the share name of the printer (end of the statement). The share name must exactly match the share name from NT. This can be found by looking at the properties of the printer in NT. Choose START, SETTINGS, PRINTERS. The sharing tab has the name as shown below:

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The printer must be shared for D3 to use it. You can give it any share name that you like. What ever you choose, the PRINTERS items in D3 must match it exactly. If the share exists on a different machine, add the \\machine name\ to whatever the machine name is.

It is worth repeating. This MUST be the share name, and not the printer name. The printer name is the NT name that shows up when you get a drop down list (such as picking a printer in Word). Do NOT use this name, use the share name.

The second line associated with the printer now assigns a D3 form queue to the newly created device. The form here is usually the same as well. It should start with “startptr”, followed by the form queue number twice “0,0” , followed by a “0” (pages to eject after print job), followed by the device number created on the previous line (sxxx). You may need to put a “(s” at the end of the line to keep certain printers from printing a blank page before your print job. Lasers are notorious for this. To confirm:

dev-make -t NtPrinter -n 229 -a "\\ACS-NT-II\Okidata ML 390"

startptr 0,0,0,s229 (s

Device number is 229

Printer is Form Queue 0 (use sp-assign F0 to print to this printer)

NT computer and share name

Note the “(S” at the end of the startptr command. This suppresses an initial blank page, before a job is printed. Most laser printers need this. Some bubble jets and dot matrix do NOT need it.

The device number is up to you. Typically we suggest that you start count down from near the maximum number of port defined in your D3 environment. You can see this in the Device Manager, or type “maxusers” at TCL

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The number of ports defined on this system is 256 (likely a default during the installation). You can freely start using a couple of ports less than this, say 254. We typically start with 240 and count down, just to allow room for other non-user type devices. The choice is yours. Do NOT nail D3 ports to these port numbers in the Device Manager or your printers will not work.

You can define the printers in QUEUE_SETUPS_MAINT. Typically on admin users will have access to this fastkey. It looks like:

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If this is a new printer, you will see the “template” option on the right side of the screen. Pick the appropriate type of printer you are setting up.

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Select the printer type (1 – laser printer) in this case and press “tab”. The balance of the fields will fill in. Now enter a printer location. This location shows up when the user tries to select a printer in the future.

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Now click on the “laser Setups” tab.

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Now click on the “config” tab.

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Now click “save”. You will potentially see that a print job was sent to the printer. This will be the programming to set the defaults for the printer. They will be automatically saved in the printer. You will then be prompted:

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This will set the defaults for this printer in your user-coldstart item called PRINTERS. This will then start the printer automatically when D3 starts the next time.

Now go to PCP_MAINT (Printer Control Panel). You can start (or re-start a printer) from here.

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Now scroll down to your printer. If it is not running, “right click” on the printer number.

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This will start (or re-start) the printer. You will not have to do this when you re-start your D3 service. It will already be started.

You can manually do this process, by getting going to CMD_LINE.

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Type the command into the window (copy the next line).

dev-make -t NtPrinter -n 186 -a "hp6p-katy"

click “process” and review the “results”.

If you do this correctly, you will see something like:

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You can then type the start printer command.

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This means that you have done this correctly.

Printers defined in this manner are available only until you restart your service, unless you set them up in QUEUE_SETUPS_MAINT and saved them to your PRINTERS item.

You print jobs now travel the following path. The reports are generated by D3 programs or procs, they are passed to the D3 print spooler. These items are viewable with the “listpeqs” command at TCL. The D3 spooler connects to the share name and passes the print job to the NT spooler. From the NT spooler it is passed to the printer. It will be in the D3 spooler only a couple of milliseconds. You will not normally ever be able to see the items in there, unless the D3 spooler cannot talk to the NT share for some reason. Occasionally, especially if the printer is defined on other machines across a network, the share connection will be lost or frozen. You may have to kill the printer form queue and device, and then recreate them. There are documents on the Knowledge Base describing this flow if it is needed.

If you need to kill a long print job, it will NOT be in the D3 spooler. Use the NT spooler window for the printer in question. Highlight the job and click on “cancel”. This will kill the job. Some power uses and your system administrator must have the appropriate NT permissions to “cancel” print jobs on these printers. See your NT system administrator for problems in this area.

If you type “sp-status” at TCL, you will see a list of printers currently available for users. This should show something similar to:

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The printers can be either “inactive” or “active” depending on if they are currently being used. You should always see “The printer is running…….”. Obviously, the printer in question should be listed on the screen as well.

There are two quick topics to cover. It is sometimes desirable to prioritize print jobs from one user over another, particularly if you have some number of people sharing a printer. This can be done fairly easily. First, when you start the printer, use the following:

startptr 7,(1,7),0,s247 (s

In this example we are starting printer “7”, and assigning both form queues “1” and “7”. When the spooler has finished printing a document, it will check for queue “1” first (it is listed first inside of the parentheses) and then print any form “7” (listed next, after the 1).

You should then assign your priority user to form queue 1 and then everyone else to 7. The priority user job will always print first.

Next you should know how to re-assign a form queue to a printer. This is useful when you are printing documents that require special paper (or forms). You do not want anyone else to print to the printer while the forms are there. Let’s assume that you have started your printer as:

startptr 7,,7,0,s247 (s

You now want to print some checks on this printer. You should utilize the following steps:

SP-KILL D7

This kills (or un-assigns) your printer 7

startptr 99,99,0,s247 (s

This starts your printer on “s247” with form queue 99

SP-ASSIGN F99

Assign yourself to the new print queue

Run your Pro:Man fastkey

SP-KILL D99

This kills (or un-assigns) your form queue 99

startptr 7,,7,0,s247 (s

Re-start your printer as normal

See the Knowledge Base for other printer related documents.

Spooler Commands (D3)

As stated above, print jobs are typically not in the D3 spooler very long, unless it is by design. We offer a couple of tools to provide this function when needed. This section of the manual will discuss the general spooler functions and some useful tricks.

The following table shows a list of commands and a brief description. This is not an exhaustive list, see your D3 documentation or the Pro:Man Knowledge Base.

|Command |Description |

|SP-ASSIGN ? |Shows the user which printer they are currently assigned to. No action |

| |can be taken with this command; it is a report only. |

|SP-ASSIGN HS |This command should be run before the user generates the report. The |

| |resulting report will be “held” in the D3 spooler for review prior to |

| |printing to a printer. The report will be visible with the SPOOL |

| |command. |

|SP-ASSIGN Fxx |Where xx is the form queue number of the printer that the report should |

| |be printed on. This is executed before the user generates the report. |

|SP-STATUS |List all available printers and form queues |

|SPOOL |A user tool to see their own print jobs held in the D3 spooler with the |

| |SP-ASSIGN HS command. This command must be run in the PRO:MAN account or|

| |a PRO:MAN user account. |

|SPOOL.ADMIN |An administrator tool to see all print jobs held in the D3 spooler, |

| |regardless of who generated them. They can be printed, deleted, or |

| |re-routed from this screen. This command must be run in the PRO:MAN |

| |account or a PRO:MAN user account. |

|LISTPEQS |D3 command to list all print jobs held in the D3 spooler. No action is |

| |available, as it is just a report |

| | |

|SP-KILL F1 |Kills print “job” number 1 and returns it to a “hold” file |

|SP-KILL D1 |Kills printer number 1 |

Backups

This section describes how to manually back up your data. These commands can, and should, be placed in your Night Time Process (NTP) described below. The syntax and process is shown here for reference.

The first step in any backup process is to connect to a device. This is done with SET-DEVICE. This can be done from any account, although normally it is done in the DM account. You should see a list of items to select from. The exact list will depend on the items you defined in the Device Manager, as explained earlier. A sample of the screen might look like:

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These will be the devices created in the Device Manager, unless you created a tape device from TCL. That device will show here as well. Simply enter the number of the Tape Device (left side of the screen) for the device that you would like to save your data to.

You will be returned to TCL. If you wish to see what device you are attached to, type the command again. You will see:

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Under the “owner” column, you will see your port number and “*”. The “*” signifies the “active” device you are attached to.

Once attached to the device, you may now save information. There are three different ways to do this. These options are:

|Command |Description |

|FILE-SAVE |Save all the database accounts on the system, unless flagged to be |

| |skipped |

|ACCOUNT-SAVE |Save an individual account. You can select a list of accounts by typing |

| |“select mds,, acct1 acct2 acct3”, press and then type |

| |account-save. |

|T-DUMP |Save the items in a specific file in a specific account. You must be |

| |logged into the account where the file resides. |

In any of these cases, you should see information scroll across the screen. You will be returned to TCL when the command completes.

First, we need to determine if the database account has been flagged to be skipped or not. If the account is flagged to be skipped, you will not be able to save the account with neither the file-save nor the account-save. You can still save an individual file in this account with the t-dump command.

There can be two different types of accounts. This depends on where the account “lives”. Accounts that live inside the VME are “D” type accounts. Accounts that “live” in the FSI are special “Q” type accounts. You can type the following command to determine which type of account you are working with.

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The above example is a “d” type account by virtue of the “D” on the first line. If this line has a “DX” on it, it is flagged to be skipped. You can set this attribute by typing “ed mds,, acctnme (D” where acctnme is the account in question. Make ABSOLUTELY sure not to change any other information. Changing lines 2 or 3 will render the account unusable, and the data will be lost.

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In the example above, the account lives in the “FSI”. The first line is a “QS” which means that the system is to “SAVE” the account. If you change the first line to a “Q”, it will be skipped. You can edit this the same way outlined for a “D” type account. Do Not change line 2 in these items.

All data type accounts should be in the FSI. Only D3 supplied accounts should be in the VME. All Pro:Man accounts and Pro:Man user accounts should be in the FSI.

You should be careful with setting these flags. It is fairly easy to forget that you changed the flag. The data will not be saved. If you need to do a full system restore, the data will not be on the tape and the account will be lost.

To help with this task, you can use a fastkey in your system called BACKSUP_MAINT.

[pic]

If you select a new backup set name, you should then likely click the “load existing settings” button.

Your screen will look something like:

[pic]

The actual account names will vary depending on your site. The accounts (databases) that are being backed up will have the appropriate check mark. Adjust these as you need to. Make sure your live data account (typically named proman-files) is checked.

Click save.

NOTE: after you do a DISK0 restore all accounts are flagged to be backed up. You can come back into the fastkey, select your back up set name, and click save. You will be prompted to update all of your accounts. This will set your system back to this known state.

Once you have saved your data or your account, you can type T-DET to release the device for others to use. This is important. If you do not release the device, other users cannot use the device. This can be one of the failures of the Night Time Processor. It will not be able to access the tape drive if you still have the device occupied.

It is convenient to create pseudo tape devices “on the fly”, without restarting the D3 service. You can create these from CMD_LINE from any account in the system. The syntax is :

Dev-make –t tape –n xx –a “c:\proman\anotherfile,p”

Replace the “xx” with the next device number available on the set-device comment. If it lists 8 devices, use a “9” in the command. Put the file name, complete with its path in double quotes after the “-a” switch. Do NOT forget the “,P” at the end of the file name.

At this point, you will see that the device was created as shown below:

[pic]

You will see “……. Created”. You will now be able to type SET-DEVICE and see your new pseudo tape device. Select the device number and then perform your saves.

If you are unsure as to what is saved on your tape device. Attach to the tape device as described above. Next type T-REW and then type it again T-REW. Once the colon reappears on the screen, type T-RDLBL . The system will respond

[pic]

The above case is an “account-save” of an account called “snyder”. A file-save tape looks the same, except that it replaces the “data snyder” with “file-save”. A t-dump will show “data im im” (or whatever the file name is). You will always be able to see the data as well.

There are several commands available to restore data from these tapes devices. You will need to attach to the device with the SET-DEVICE command first. Type two T-REW commands.

To restore an entire account from either an account-save or a full file-save, you use

ACCOUNT-RESTORE newacctname (z

You will be prompted for the name of the account on the tape to restore from. You will need to enter old account name. This will look like:

[pic]

The system will respond with the file names scrolling across the screen as it restores the data. Once you are returned to TCL, you may log into the new account.

If you wish to delete one of these accounts, you may do so with either of two accounts. If the account type is a “D” type account (as shown above), you must use:

Delete-account oldacctnme

You will be prompted to see the accounts first, answer “N”

Next you will be prompted to delete the account, answer “Y”

If the account is a “Q” or “QS” type,

Nt_delete-account oldacctnme

You will not be prompted for anything else.

The old account will be deleted.

User-related Maintenance

This section covers user type maintenance from a system point of view. The creation of users and specifics of their environment is discussed in a later section. We will cover how to see a list of users, how to reset a user, and how many users are logged on.

These commands should be typed in the DM account.

First, you can type “maxusers” to see the number of users currently logged on and the maximum number of users that are licensed for your database. This screen looks like:

Next you can get a list of users who are logged on. This is done by typing “listu”. This will list the users, the account they are logged into, and their location. A sample screen might look like:

[pic]

In this example, a user “jess” is logged into the DM account. The location is defined based on the PIBS entry for port 2. This is covered in the users section later on.

Checking System Related Phantoms

There are two phantoms that we use for a normal Pro:Man installation. Phantoms are processes that run by themselves in the background. They do consume database licenses. They can consume a Pro:Man license, depending on what they are doing.

The first phantom is called the Night Time Processor. This is a phantom process that wakes up at a user-defined time and runs a stream of fastkeys. These are defined in your Pro:Man account with the BATCH_MAINT screen. Setting up NTP is covered in other documents. Normally this phantom should be sleeping. As administrator, you should ensure that it is still running and is in the correct state.

To check to see if the phantom is still logged on, you should do a “listu” command. Your phantoms will have port numbers higher than the max number of ports set up for your system.

[pic]

Shutting down your System

This section is extremely important. You must shut down your system properly or you may lose data. The SYNC process was described above. Properly using this process will help to retain your data integrity. Failure to properly shut down your machine will result in some data loss and possible corrupting of your VME requiring a system restore.

You must shut down your D3 environment before you shut down NT ! There are two ways to do this. First, you can log into your DM account and type SHUTDOWN. You may want to make sure there are no users on the system with a LISTU command. They system will display each port on the system as it closes the process. Finally you will lose your connection to the database, as your port is terminated. Once this has happened, you can shut down NT.

The second way to shut down your D3 environment is to use the services window. Open your services window from the CONTROL PANEL, ADMINISTRATOR TOOLS. Highlight the D3 Virtual Machine, and click on the STOP icon on the top of the screen. You must allow the system sufficient time to finish the wrapup. This typically takes a couple of minutes. The services window will report the service stopped before it is actually complete. Either allow a couple of minutes, or use the TASK MANAGER to verify that the service has indeed completely stopped.

You must logically shut down NT as you would any Windows station. Failure to shut down NT correctly will result in cache being lost. This means that some of your records may not be written to disk and will be lost during the reboot.

Night Time Processor

The Night Time Processor (NTP) is a phantom process that should be running all the time. This is a process that sleeps most of the time. We have a user-defined time that it wakes up and runs a list of D3 processes, or Pro:Man fastkeys. It is the administrator’s job to ensure that the phantom is running correctly. This should normally be done first thing in the morning. Most sites have their backup in the NTP and this is how you verify that it worked correctly.

First, we need to see the phantom is still logged on. You can do this by checking the phantom as shown above the LISTU command. This only ensures that the phantom has not been logged off by some error.

Second, we need to view the activity of the NTP from the previous night’s stream of jobs. You must be in your Pro:Man account to do this. Type SHOP_PM_LOG at the bottom of your menu or from TCL. You will be prompted for a starting and ending date, as well as a destination for the report. Normally, the screen is fine, as we want to confirm that all jobs ran as scheduled. The screen will look like:

[pic]

In the example above, we are reviewing the jobs scheduled for 12/2/10. We wish the results to be displayed on the screen and not to the printer.

One note about dates: If your NTP is set to wake up at 1:00 am, all the results will be displayed with the current date. In other words, on the morning of 11/7, I would use 11/7 as my start and end date. If my NTP is set to wake at 11:00 pm, I will need to use the previous day’s date to view the results. All the jobs from that run will be reported with the previous date, even if the processing goes over midnight.

The results of this report may look like:

[pic]

The above results are good. They are sorted with the most recent job at the top of the list. So, the first job is at the bottom of the screen. Our NTP wakes up at 9:00 pm. It runs a fastkey called UPDATE.ALL.ACCT.MENU.F, first. It has a start and a stop time and basically took six seconds to run. Next the fastkey, REFRESH_BASELINE, is run. This took 30 seconds to run.

Typically, our backups and dashboard updates listed next. There can be any number of jobs in your NTP.

If the last job has no stop time, the process did not finish. There can be several reasons for this, such as there is no tape in the drive, a second tape is required, etc. See the Knowledge Base for documents on “NTP” for how to take corrective action.

Normally we want to see all jobs with a start and stop time. If so, the NTP worked fine. Next you can confirm its state by using the D3 “WHERE” command. You will need your phantom port number from the LISTU command shown above. Once you have the port number type,

WHERE 257 (z

You should see a screen something similar to :

[pic]

This is the correct state for the phantom. It should say “sleepsubx:000” near the middle of the screen. If you feel the process for the previous night is finished and the screen does not look like the above, contact your Pro:Man representative or check the Knowledge Base for more information.

Sync

This is not likely needed on any 2003 or 2008 server.

All servers cache data to some degree. NT/2000 is no exception.

We have had previous alerts that spoke of auto shutdown software and its importance in having the server write cache information to the hard drive. The truth is that there are still instances that cause NT to not shut down properly. These include people turning off the power switch on the server, the "standard blue screen of death" from running other applications, and others. Basically any situation that causes the server to NOT shut down (and you see the "please wait while saving data" message), can cause a data loss.

We have found a shareware program that forces the server to flush this cache to hard disk. This program does not appear to have a significant affect on server performance. We are therefore recommending that this be implemented on all Pro:Man servers. This does not guarantee that all types of caching controllers will flush their cache as well. You should check with those manufacturers to find if any feature allows you to force write at some interval.

As administrator you must make sure that the phantom is running. The notes about the NTP phantom are similar to these requirements. The phantom will sleep most of the time. Depending on how you MCF items are configured, this phantom will wake up every few minutes (say 15 in some cases), run the process and then go back to sleep. So if you do a WHERE on this port number, it may or may not say “sleep….”, as it is awake more often. It never takes but a few seconds to run, so if you check in say 15 seconds, it should be back to sleep. If you have your MCF item set up to log the process, you can check this file. In you Pro:Man account, you can type

LIST.SYNC

Input a date range and a destination. You should see a screen similar to:

[pic]

The last line in each job lists “flushing: C D F”. Your site will be different depending on the number of drive letters configured on your local machine. By default, all drives on your local machine are flushed. See your NT administrator for more information on how this line should look.

The log file will fill rather quickly. If you have set your MCF item for 15-minute increments, you will get 96 log entries every day. Some people actually set this to a smaller time frame, meaning more log entries. We suggest that you normally leave the log flag turned off. Once a week or so, turn it on for a while, check the log, and then turn it back off. This will ensure that it is working correctly.

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