Preventive Maintenance

[A Lim]

Hi,

Does anyone here has a regular Preventive Maintenance done on cloverleaf (version 5.3 – 5.7)? I am trying find out what needs to be done in a PM for cloverleaf and I am having some issues in trying to find some details on what we should be looking at during PM. E.g. what activities should be done to ensure cloverleaf and its threads will be running fine.

Would appreciate some help in this area.

Thanks.

Topic

[A Lim]

No one does anything to cloverleaf periodically to ensure it runs smoothly and with no issues?

[William Rowley]

Well, at CUHC we reboot the AIX server every 5 years whether it needs it or not.

Other than that we check the error database each weekday and address any errors found, keep an eye on the disk space usage, and sometimes when the major applications have a donwtime we will initialize the databases (provided that they are empty).

We have scripts in place that cycle process logs and SMAT files, and also to archive / prune the old files.

The production server is backed up each weekday and the test server every Saturday.

We do not do any kind of hardware PM (like in the old days) – today’s budget-focused operations allow only for swapping parts if they break.

[Mike Campbell]

We are similar to William.  We are running CL 6.0 on AIX.  

We have alerts set up that fire whenever a message is sent to the error database which emails the team to check.  Otherwise, we do a nightly archive of SMAT and scripts that monitor disk space, swap space, etc.

[Robert Kersemakers]

Yep, not a lot of things to do regarding PM.

We are still on CL5.5.

SMAT files are cycled and archived/deleted every night or every week, depending on the size of the SMAT file.

Messages in the error db are handled every workday. Alerts and others built-in procedures will alert the team (or usersgroups) if there are immediate problems.

We do a scheduled monthly bounce of all processes, but some processes are also bounced weekly.

Problem we have had was that the hardware (HP-UX ia64) went out of service, without us knowing it. We are now in process of migrating to CL6.0 on RHEL.

Zuyderland Medisch Centrum; Heerlen/Sittard; The Netherlands

[Jim Beall]

Virtually nothing here as far as PM is concerned.  Daily SMAT file backups, monitoring scripts take care of notifying us if there’s anything in the error D/B or queue backups.  We don’t even cycle processes on a scheduled basis.  We’re on older software (5.6) and hardware (HP UX), but it’s extremely stable.  Will be tempting fate soon by migrating to 6.x and RHEL but I’m cautiously optimistic it’ll be stable too.

[Rob Lindsey]

We are running on AIX 6.1 – CL 5.8.5 and have all that the above have in regards to the SMAT files being rolled into an archive nightly.  We also have the error database script checks.

One thing that I do is to bounce (stop and start) each process on the system weekly.  Not all at the same time of course.  This might mask a runaway process but I have some other scripts that run that let me know that condition.

Rob

[David Teh]

Depends on your platform which you didn’t state.

Have you read the documentation? There are chapters dealing with your question under Operations.

Also, take note of any unresolved bugs for your particular version/platform.

[Again, read your documentation].

It’s more what’s being done (read scripted/scheduled) on a daily basis rather than once a month/quarterly. [Of course, if you are on Windoze, you have the OS specific maintenance issues].

[A Lim]

Interesting that most are running AIX or something other than windows. Unfortunately, the sites I am task to find out about PM on the servers are all running QDX on windows. The sites have either 5.3 or 5.7 version.

David, no I have not read the documentation as I don’t think I have a copy of them. I am rather new to the task and being loaded with such a task to come up with PM at a short period of time, it was a shot in the dark to see if anyone has something which I could based on.

Thanks for the responses all. Will have to mull over the documentation, looking for the information and also take in what you have given. If anyone could add on more on this, that would be of great help.

[A Lim]

David,

I have found 5.3 Operations Guide. I assume that’s what you are taking about in terms of “dealing with my question”?

I took a quick look at the pages of that document and I only see information on the different sections of the software, but nothing much on maintenance or preventive, unless we are talking about the troubleshooting section.

So maybe I am not looking at the right documentation… Would appreciate if you could help with more specific details? Thanks!

[David Teh]

Try User Guide Vol 2, Appendix D.

Anyway, do read through all the docs.

[Troy Morton]

There is one PM task that I like to do that was not mentioned here.

[Author]

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