#System Administration

I have created a class file that I want to execute daily to gather Metrics (Message Header, Space Available, etc..) and write the data into a Cache table. Now that I have written the class I want to add it to the Task Scheduler within Ensemble to run every morning. How do I go about getting the class file created as a Task within the Task Scheduler? The Documentation isn't as clear cut for creating custom tasks as one would expect.

Hi beloved members of the Community!

It is very common in the daily life of IRIS or Health Connect users that it is necessary to install new instances or update the ones they already have and in many cases it is not these same users who carry out the installation, but rather systems personnel who often do not take into account the particularities of the assignment of permissions necessary for the installation.

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 :)

In this post, I show strategies for backing up InterSystems IRIS using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot-based solutions. Most solutions I see today are deployed on Linux on VMware, so a lot of the post shows how solutions integrate VMware snapshot technology as examples.

In a containerized environment, you can manage your container time via the TZ variable or via the /etc/timezone and /etc/localtime directories:

environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Paris

volumes:
    - "/etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro"
    - "/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro"

You can find complete examples here:

IRIS Community

IRISHealth_Community

IRIS production

IRISHealth production

Hi,

I recently had a company-enforced OS upgrade, and ever since going from mac OS 14.x to 15.x, I am currently having issues with SSL in IRIS.

An ARM (M3 pro) machine running OS 15.2, with the latest Docker Desktop (at the time of writing, 4.37.0). The Docker container runs IRIS for UNIX (Ubuntu Server LTS for x86-64 Containers) 2022.1.2 (Build 574_0_22161U). This container has not changed.

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in GCP, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to GCP, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in GCP as subnets always span the entire region). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without using Load Balancers suggested in most other GCP reference architectures.

Hello,

I was just trying to get to the bottom of a TLS config - we have an interface with a TLS config that has had 'Server certificate verification' set to 'On', however the cert file specified either did not exist or contained a cert that was expired.

Does anyone know what the behavior is for this typically? I would expect this to not allow traffic on the interface, however this has been working fine for a few years now with an invalid cert specified for 'Server certificate verification' and set to 'On'.

Hi,

In a customer project we started enforcing the "Inactivity Limit" as defined in System-Wide Security Parameters. The customer would expect accounts to become Disabled after they have been inactive for the specified amount of days. However, that doesn't happen; it seems the Inactivity Limit is only established after logging in.

Furthermore, the account inactivity only starts being applied after the first login. Can you confirm that?

Lastly, for accounts that have been manually Disabled, and have an expired password, we see the following weird behavior:

I am developing locally on my IRIS instance using VSCode and client-side editing approach. How can I automatically export a single .cls file/a whole package to a remote TEST/PREPROD server using a script or command line and recompile the unit remotely? Are there any more simple and straightforward ways than CI/CD explained in the series of articles by Eduard?

InterSystems FAQ rubric

It can be obtained with a List query of the %SYS.Namespace class.

1. Create a routine like this:

getnsp
   set statement=##class(%SQL.Statement).%New()
   set status=statement.%PrepareClassQuery("%SYS.Namespace","List")
   set resultset=statement.%Execute()
   while resultset.%Next() {
       write resultset.%Get("Nsp"),!
   }
   quit

2. Run it in your terminal

The method of executing class queries introduced in this article can be applied in a variety of cases.

September 24, 2018 – Advisory: VMWare vSAN and Data Integrity

Clients running vSAN 6.6 or later should review a very important article that VMware published on September 21, 2018.  The article describes the possibility of file system and database corruption, which can lead to outages and possible data loss, and we believe that some of our clients have encountered this issue.  Therefore, we encourage you to act on this as soon as possible.

The VMWare knowledge base article is titled:

InterSystems FAQ rubric

The maximum number of namespaces that can be created in one instance is 2047. However, to use a large number of namespaces, you will need to configure memory accordingly.

The maximum number of databases (including remote databases) that can be created in one instance is 15998. Depending on the type of license, there may be restrictions on the number that can be created. For details, please refer to the following document.
Database Configuration [IRIS]
Database Configuration
 

Hi,

We see a lot of TCPIP connection error for few of the components not sure if it is a network glitch at the source/target or is it with us. And most of the times these errors are very transient and vanish on their own and the connection gets re established and the messages get processed. Here is the error we mostly see

ERROR <Ens>ErrTCPTerminatedReadTimeoutExpired: TCP Read timeout (30) expired waiting for terminator SegTerminatorAscii=13, on |TCP|50007|10620, data received =''

or

Hi Community!

Suppose you have a working system on 8-bit Caché database and need to transfer the solution to Unicode database.

How do you manage that?

I am trying to track down a problem we saw this morning with our TEST environment. We had a momentary issue where InterSystems HealthShare Health Connect could not connect correctly to LDAP. When we tried to login and could not connect to LDAP, the system would Delete our users.

the Test LDAP function would return a "Can't contact LDAP server". I went through the Certificates, made sure they had the correct permissions and were not expired.

What is Journaling?

Journaling is a critical IRIS feature and a part of what makes IRIS a reliable database. While journaling is fundamental to IRIS, there are nuances, so I wrote this article to summarize (more briefly than our documentation which has all the details) what you need to know. I realize the irony of saying the 27 minute read is brief.

Currently we are exploring how we can allocate additional disk space to our current environment as we have seen a significant increase in growth of our Database files. Currently we have 3 namespaces, all with 1 IRIS.dat each that contains both the Global and Routines.

Since we have started down the route of everything within a single IRIS.dat file for each namespace, is it logical as we see growth to be able to split the current IRIS.dat for each namespace into a separate IRIS.dat for global and a IRIS.dat with for routines for each namespace in a Mirror environment?

For practical reasons, it may be desirable that after a Linux server restart, the IRIS instance is automatically started. 

Below you will find the steps to follow to automate the startup of IRIS during a reboot of the Linux server, via systemd :

1. Create an iris.service file in /etc/systemd/system/iris.service containing the following information

Hi,

Can we write message in the messages.log file ?

Thanks

InterSystems FAQ rubric

Temporary globals stored in the IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases are used when a process does not need to store data indefinitely, but requires the powerful performance of globals. The IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases are not journaled, so using temporary globals does not create journal files.

The system uses the IRISTEMP/CACHETEMP databases for temporary storage and are available to users for the same.

For more information about temporary globals and the IRISTEMP database, see the following document:
Temporary Globals and the IRISTEMP Database

The globals used as temporary are:

When there's a performance issue, whether for all users on the system or a single process, the shortest path to understanding the root cause is usually to understand what the processes in question are spending their time doing.  Are they mostly using CPU to dutifully march through their algorithm (for better or worse); or are they mostly reading database blocks from disk; or mostly waiting for something else, like LOCKs, ECP or database block collisions?

InterSystems FAQ rubric

Here, we will introduce a sample code for registering and referencing task schedules.

 ①Sample of task schedule registration

*Create a task to execute do ^TEST every day at 1:00 am. 

I have created some example Ansible modules that add functionality above and beyond simply using the Ansible builtin Command or Shell modules to manage IRIS. You can use these as an inspiration for creating your own modules. My hope is that this will be the start of creating an IRIS community Ansible collection.

• I am assuming you are already familiar with Ansible. For example see the community post: Ansible Community Post
• This post follows up on my 2024 Global Summit presentation.
• The source code and demo scripts are available on GitHub here: GitHub

I found myself in the not-so-comfortable situation of working with a Linux system on which someone had accidentally disabled user access to the Linux shell. HealthConnect was running, servicing hundreds of interfaces. To resolve the access issue, though, we needed to bring the host down for the application of a fix.

Without the shell, the iris command is not available to control the instance, so we were faced with the potential of shutting down the server ungracefully. We wanted to avoid that if possible ...

I have a few routines in ^rINDEX that are missing in ^ROUTINE. At least some of those routines lack a timestamp, probably Date and Time Modified in ^rINDEX. It causes D %RO crash when such a routine is referenced by a routine range, since "" is an illegal $ZDTH value.

Healthy entry (note the timestamp): ^rINDEX("ABC,"INT")    =    $lb("2021-06-15 15:08:38.846885",)   ;The second argument is sometimes present and sometimes not, likely the routine size.

Unhealthy entry (note an empty timestamp): ^rINDEX("DEF,"INT")    =    $lb("",21) 

Could someone explain how and why a HL7 ACK be showing up as a Orphaned message when I run the following SQL...
 

SELECT HL7.ID,HL7.DocType,HL7.Envelope,HL7.Identifier,HL7.MessageTypeCategory,HL7.Name,HL7.OriginalDocId,HL7.ParentId, HL7.TimeCreated
FROM EnsLib_HL7.Message HL7
LEFTJOIN Ens.MessageHeader hdr
ON HL7.Id=hdr.MessageBodyId
WHERE hdr.MessageBodyId ISNULL

I am trying to find the problem code that is causing the Orphaned messages, and an ACK showing up seems kind of Odd. While we do have Archive IO/Trace on, and Index NOT OK's set why would they show up as Orphaned messages?

We are constantly running into issues where there are billions of Orphaned messages in our system that cause problems, and we have to manually run a cleanup to fix performance issues.

 In the following article about orphaned messages... https://community.intersystems.com/post/ensemble-orphaned-messages it mentions either programmatically eliminating the Orphaned messages or using a Utility like Demo.Util.CleanupSet in ENSDEMO.

I have had it explained to me is basically all messages have to go somewhere, if they aren't then it creates orphaned messages. 

We recently moved from using the Private Web Server, to using an Apache/Web Gateway setup and moved towards using the built in LDAP functionality within IRIS. Since then, we have 1 user that uses VSCode (/api/atelier) heavily that continues to have issues signing into IRIS through VS Code and the /api/atelier extension.

I am trying to troubleshoot two issues..

• User having login failures with correct password. 

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