Re: Art's eventalarm questions

Gary Quiring wrote: > I am confused about the eventalarm backing up transaction logs. If I > am running ontape -s -L 0 eventalarm is telling me an ontape is already That should not happen. More likely another logical log completed immediately prior to log 631 and was still being archived. Eventalarm detected that and exited. Either log 631 would get picked up by the ontape -a archiving logical log 630 or the one started for logical log 632 when it completes. There is a possibility, eventalarm detects a previous iteration still running by looking in a log file, event.S2.C23 which will have been created by any running copy of eventalarm in the startup directory of oninit (usually but not always that's $INFORMIXDIR). When it starts up for a logical log archive, eventalarm checks for the existence of that file and if it exists tries to read the pid its sibling would have written there. If it reads a pid it tries to ping the task with kill(pid,0). If the task exists or if the file existed and was empty (which might indicate a race condition with an eventalarm copy that's in the process of writting to the file) it prints that message and exits. If there was no file it creates a new one. If the file existed but the pid no longer exists it rewinds the file. Then it writes its own pid into that file to prevent double runs. When it is finished, eventalarm leaves the file there. It IS possible that a random task, perhaps event the ontape -s run, could have the same pid as the previous run of eventalarm, but unlikely. When this happens, you can just delete the file to fix the problem. The file is binary, but it is possible to type the contents in hex with od -x and translate them into a decimal pid using bc or some other tool to see if this is the problem. > running. Is that normal? I thought it just checked for ontape -a jobs? > My full backup takes several hours. Is there anyway to make it backup > the logs with a full backup running? Bottom line, normally it should do that barring the pid confusion mentioned above. > Jun 09 11:12:04 :NonFatal Event: Severity=2, Class=23. > Jun 09 11:12:04 :5 args passed > Jun 09 11:12:04 :Arg 0: "/usr/local/bin/eventalarm". > Jun 09 11:12:04 :Arg 1: "2". > Jun 09 11:12:04 :Arg 2: "23". > Jun 09 11:12:04 :Arg 3: "Logical Log 631 Complete, timestamp: > 0xab3e3741.". > Jun 09 11:12:04 :Arg 4: "Logical Log 631 Complete, timestamp: > 0xab3e3741.". > Jun 09 11:12:04 :ontape is already running. > > Also I just want to make sure I am understanding this whole setup. Do > I need to use the log_full.sh script that Art provided or does > eventalarm use it's own? The log_full.sh is just an example of writing your own script to archive the logs using ontape, just as the delivered log_full.sh does using onbar, if you do not want the full eventalarm feature set. Installing eventalarm in the ALARMPROGRAM onconfig entry and creating the eventalarm.cfg in $INFORMIXDIR with the settings you want is all you need to do to get eventalarm working. > ALARMPROGRAM /usr/local/bin/eventalarm > LTAPEDEV /u/ifmxlogs> Art S. Kagel