Thursday, April 30, 2009

I got a working system but tacmd login hangs...

I recently "inherited" a small ITM environment. It had been used as a Proof of Concept trial, passed with flying colours and now the client wanted to start using it. Obviously, the way to save time is to simply reuse the existing environment, because it already works.
And at first glance, it did. Everything seemed to function properly for the first day or two, till I wanted to export all the situations to a file before I did some heavier work.

That's when I discovered that the command tacmd login didn't work. It just hang there for a few minutes and exited with a KUIC00006E timeout error.

Eventually, I found the solution, which is also documented here*. The problem was that some change had been done to the network on the server which meant that just about everything worked.

So the lesson learned here is that when you come to an unknown environment, no matter how simple and small it appears - make sure everything works properly before signing off on it :)

 

-- Robert

* This actually happened a few months ago, but the publication of this note reminded me.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Reusing computer names - TADDM discovery

When a server is virtualized, i.e. converted from a physical server into a virtual server, then TADDM had a problem.
Because these are different computers, that merely share the same name (fully qualified domain name - FQDN), they show up twice in the inventory list.

Worse, the old server exists in all the business applications, but the new one doesn't. I'd have to manually update all the applications with the new servers.

Fortunately, TADDM 7.1.2 Interim Fix 1 has just been released. Among it's improvements there is this:

IZ44531 Reusing fully qualified domain names causes operating systems to be shared among old and
new computer systems. In 712, one can now prevent OS FQDN from being set by using the following collation.properties setting:
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN
If property does not exist in collation.properties, the default value is taken.
Default value is false. If the customer set it to true, FQDN will not be set for the OS.


Property can be configurated through the OS or IP:
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.Linux.1.2.3.4
or
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.Linux
or
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.1.2.3.4
Where Linux is the OS name and 1.2.3.4 is the IP.


Example for ignoring FQDN on VMWare operating systems:
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.Vmnix=true

Note that the os.fqdn is not unset if it is already there. This change only applies to NEW operating systems.
To find operating systems that share computer systems, use this query;
./dbquery.sh "select GUID_X, PK__OSRUNNING_X, LASTMODIFIEDTIME_X,
CONTEXTIP_X, SIGNATURE_X from COMPSYS where PK__OSRUNNING_X IN (SELECT
comp.PK__OSRUNNING_X from COMPSYS comp, OPSYS op where
comp.PK__OSRUNNING_X = op.GUID_X || '-0' and
op.PK__PARENTOPERATINGSYSTEM_X != comp.GUID_X || '-0') order by
PK__OSRUNNING_X, LASTMODIFIEDTIME_X"


The api delete command can be used to remove the computer system which is no longer valid.

Some other interesting tidbits in the new fix:

  • REST Api
    New API to allow TADDM data and functionality to be used over
    HTTP with JSON and XML. See "Developing applications using the REST API" in
    the SDK Developer's Guide for more information. Very interesting
  • Add copy capability to details panel in the TADDM GUI console. Needed this from day 1!
  • IZ39662 The installer should fail and cause a FATAL error if the files required for
    installation are not there. This was my bug!
  • IZ41245 The TADDM installer should remove obsolete files that can cause errors in the logs. This is something all applications should always do - how many times have we seen old and unneeded files, configuration items and miscellaneous objects in older software?

Good luck with the new version :)

-- Robert