cloverleaf 6.0 – concern about site name length limit

[Russ Ross]

Currently, our site names are no more than 19 characters long.

While installing Cloverleaf 6.0 under AIX 6.1 TL7 SP5 in our case, I read the following snippets from the install guide that has me concerned.

from page 67 of the Cloverleaf 6.0 install guide

Site names cannot be empty or contain spaces, uppercase letters, special characters, or be more than 19 characters in length.

from page 72 of the cloverleaf 6.0 install guide:

Site names can be any combination of lower-case letters, numerical digits, and underscore (_) characters.

For a default installation, the recommended length for a site name is 16 characters or less.

If the location name is other than default, the length may be limited to fewer characters.

If any of your existing site names violate these rules, you must rename the sites before promoting them.

My interpretation of deafault location is /opt/cloverleaf.

So what I did with my install was create a symobilic link /cloverleaf to point to my physical location of /upgrade/cloverleaf, in case this might buy me 3 more characters and get me back to the 19 characters we currently use for sitenames.

After the Cloverleaf 6.0 install ran okay, I see my CL_INSTALL_DIR=/cloverleaf/cis6.0 and not CL_INSTALL_DIR=/upgrade/cloverleaf/cis6.0 so that trick at least reduced the length of the path.

Before I had read about the 16 character or less sitename length restriction, I had planned to tell the cloverleaf 6.0 install to use /upgrade/cloverleaf and not trick it with a symbolic link of /cloverleaf that points to /upgrade/cloverleaf.

I’ve been sucessfully using this method of tricking older versions of Cloverleaf installers to reduce the pain of the directory name changes that kept occuring everytime another company bought whoever owned cloverleaf last, so the method has worked in the past for me, by creating the symbolic link before running the cloverleaf install.

Since application names survive longer than company names, it is good to see the directory is now named after the cloverleaf application.

With all that said, I was wondering what comments anyone else might have about this.

In older versions of cloverleaf I had 19 characters to work with for sitenames, and if the site names might be restricted below 19 characters in cloverleaf 6.0, I need to know that and understand exactly what the restirctions are.

With the way the install guide seems to contradict itself, I’m not sure what to think, so I decided to post on clovertech and see what consensus I might get.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

Topic

[Donna Hooe]

Russ,

What are the character limits for the thread names in version 6.0?  I haven’t been able to get the documentation yet for 6.0.

[Russ Ross]

The reason I made this post was to hopefully get an answer to our question.

How long can a site name be in Cloverleaf 6.0 and are there conditions that could also limit the site name length?

Since the documentation contradicts itself, I’m not able to use the doucmentation to get the answer to our question.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Carson Nguyen]

Russ Ross wrote:

The reason I made this post was to hopefully get an answer to our question.

How long can a site name be in Cloverleaf 6.0 and are there conditions that could also limit the site name length?

Since the documentation contradicts itself, I’m not able to use the doucmentation to get the answer to our question.

Has anyone been able to get a definitive answer on the site and thread name limitations?

[Russ Ross]

This question is still up in the air for me and I’m unable to add any more information at this time.

We did move forward with Cloverelaaf 6.0 and have all test sites live and 70% of our prod sites live with a couple of months left to get them all live.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Max Drown (Infor)]

Here’s an idea, use shorter site names!!!

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Russ Ross]

In my case what I really need is longer site names.

Still a clarification would be helpful to know just how short a site name needs to be confined to.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Max Drown (Infor)]

I’ll ask R&D and get back to you.

Out of curiosity, why do your site names need to be so long?

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Russ Ross]

My observation and experience is that we can use longer site names to be make our work easier to develop and maintain.

I did not consider 15-19 character sitenames all that long, they seem rather restrictive to me.

I must not be the only one because I’m always having to remind other team members they exceeded my max comfort level of more than 19 characters.

We even changed hciconnstatus and hicprocstatus to display 25 characters because the team could not make due with 15 characters for thread names or process names.

In fact, it recently came to my attention while upgrading from Cloverleaf 5.6 to 6.0, that so many process names greater than 25 characters exist I can’t even take on remediating them.

All of us still have been hard pressed to stay within those 25 characters and with site names there is no difference except they are even shorter that 25 characters.

We have hundereds of sites so having enough lenght to employee human digestible site name standards is preferred over having a decoder ring for very abbreviated site names.

For our batch sites we did resort to ID #’s that require decoding like

test_batch_001

.

.

test_batch_065

You may have seen my posts about change control today, so when adding things to the site name like sitename_new or sitename_old that right there is an extra 4 characters before I even get started with a base site name.

Jim Kosloskey feel free to chime in because I recall how hard it was to fit sitenames into 19 characters for the Sorian project with all the proposed environments and various granulaity.

Having an environment as part of the site name like p_ or prod_ or t_ or test_ makes the unique part of the site name even shorter, too.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Jim Kosloskey]

I would agree that the various naming limitations for all objects within Cloverleaf should be specified along with an explanation for the reason for the limit within the documentation.

At one time I thought I heard that some of the name length restrictions which were related to the Raima DB would be extended or possibly eliminated with progression to a newer release of Raima.

It appears there is a newer releasre of Raima with Cloverleaf 6.0. So if that has relieved some of the object name length restictions it would be helpful to know that as well.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Bob Richardson]

Greetings,

One and All,  I had explored this question of why there is an implied restriction on site, process, and thread name limits.  We were informed that there is a 48 character limit overall involved here:

Note: we were running 5.7R2 on a lower level than our current AIX 6.1:

Below is a response from then Lawson Support CASE 159538 on 9/26/2011:

The site+process+thread is

because upon thread startup the

thread requests a unique user

from the Raima database so it

can gain access. That user name

is generated by appending the

site, process, and thread name.

The 48 character limit is to avoid

database corruption.

Also: “ancient” memory banks of this person (back on Integrator Releases in the 3’s) recalls routing issues when the first 15 characters of a thread are NOT unique in a thread name longer than 15 characters!

We have maintained a practice of always insuring that a thread name’s first 15 characters are unique in cases where we implement longer thread named interfaces.

And, on the subject of “conflicting documentation”:  in my opinion that is long running problem with the Cloverleaf tech writers.  One can only hope that now a BIG Fish has swallowed up the Cloverleaf folks they would allocate some resources to clean up the documentation.

I hope this helps and certainly we at Allina would welcome the facts too!

Thanks.

[Russ Ross]

Thanks Bob for posting.

We also try to put the unique part of thread names at the front within the first 15 characters as we learned this the hard way.

Having smaller sites with fewer threads helps to keep us out of trouble with the first 15 characters of 2 threads in a site matching.

It is a bit of a concern to hear about a 48 total character restriction, because our process name + thread name consumes those 48 characters in a great majority of cases before adding the site name length.

We have been tyring to work with (19 for site name) + (25 for process name) + (25 for thread name) which exceeds 48 characters.

We have a good many cases that go some beyond these bariers but we aren’t aware of issues.

Perhaps our smaller sites are helping with problems we might see if we had fewer larger sites.

I still prefer to know just what it takes to stay out of trouble, thanks again for you post.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

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