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operations:backup_control

This wiki is not maintained! Do not use this when setting up AuScope experiments!

Backup control system

Occasionally, especially for Yg, eRc can refuse to connect or frequently drop out. The VNC session can also suffer some problems, has quite a heavy network load, and doesn't allow copy-paste. The field system ships with a suite of tools to allow it to be access from a terminal, so as an alternative to eRc and VNC, a 'tmux' layout has been created to present these tools in a convenient manner. As this is purely text based and amenable to compression over ssh, it is very light on network usage.

Usage

You can access it either by:

  • The shortcuts on the ops2 desktop labelled Yg backup control, et.c.
  • Or, on any PC, ssh into the pcfs in a large terminal window and run “./fscntl.sh”.

This will present you with a a terminal window similar with a similar layout to e-RemoteCtrl.

To get the alarm system working, you need to stream the log files to ops2, or the PC with the log monitor. This can be done with ssh and tail, but there is a shell script on ops2 which does this for you.

To stream the current log file

On ops2 run

  • ~/stream_log yg

You will need to rerun this when the log file changes.

You can then point the log monitor to the file indicated by the script.

By default, the cursor should be in the oprin pane at the bottom of the window. If it isn't, you can change active panes by pressing “Ctrl+b” then an arrow key. The oprin window is the same program that runs in the VNC, so tab-completion and up-arrows should work as expected.

Quirks

As the script is very simple, there are a few quirks. Importantly, the log in the central pane will not update when the fs log is changes.

You may also find the session in funny states if someone opens it in a small window, or if fs has been terminated. The control setup runs in a tmux session, so it is persistent across window closes and disconnects. This means simply closing and reopening it will not reset the setup.

The easiest way to fix these is to kill the session and restart it.

To reset the session:

  • press Ctrl+b and type :kill-session
  • reopen the session.

Technical Details

The script runs a tmux session with the oprin, monit2, monit3 and monit5 programs built into the fs. The central pane runs tail -f on the current log file, which is found by the lognm program.

For the log in the central pane, it should be possible to follow the new log when the fs changes log files by looking for “log=”. Alternatively, the fs program itself can be run in the central pane, or run in another tmux session attached to the central pane, which would allow non-logging commands like “list” to be displayed there too.

/home/www/auscope/opswiki/data/pages/operations/backup_control.txt · Last modified: 2014/11/22 02:31 by David Horsley