Peach Runtime Administration

Starting Peach

Both the job server and the job daemons are run as root. The PEACH environmental variable must also be defined to start any of the Peach commands.

The first time the Peach is run, the server must be started first to set up the .Peach configuration file that holds the server settings. Once this is set up, the server can be stopped and started at any time. The job server does not start on startup so it has to be manually started if the computer is restarted. The server is started by:
$PEACH/pserv [-verbose | -fresh | -check]
The -verbose option cause the server to send out additional information to the administrative user by email. The -fresh option causes the server to start up without reading any state files, i.e. all previous job or job daemon information will be lost. The -ocheck option causes the server to perform the safety check which requires the administrative user to verify the last changes to the Peach program files. The server attributes may be changed by updating the $PEACH/.peach file.

The job daemon is started by:
$PEACH/pjobd [pjob_id]
The optional argument specifies a particular job daemon number. If there is another job daemon with the same number, the server will kill the younger job daemon, i.e., it will not launch successfully.  Upon starting, the job daemon reads the system configuration from the $CONFIG_DIR/.pjobd file.  This file can be tweaked by the administrator to get optimum conditions for both the user and the job daemon.

The files pjobd.pid and pserv.pid are written to the /var/run directory.

More information about pserv and pjobd can be found at the respective pages.


Managing users

Adding users

A user can be added:
$PEACH/ppass <user_name> <user_ID> <group_ID>

The administrator must have the user ID and the group ID ready (these must be system-wide consistent). The user will be asked to type in a password and e-mail address.

The administrator must ensure that the users set the following correctly in their resource files:
symlinks = ignore


Runtime control

The pview program provides a number of administrative options.

Administration of the system can be done through the pview interface.  This interface allows the administrator to restart (r) and shutdown (s) parts of the system by targeting specific pjobd_id numbers or using keys words such as server or all to shutdown the server or all the job daemons respectively.  The upgrade (u) command is used to upgrade the job daemons when there have been upgrades upgrades of to the system. Please note that when an upgrade has been made to the source code, the server should be first shutdown and then restarted before using the upgrade command on the job daemons. The reason for this proceedure is to ensure a respectable security level of the system.  Since each component works independently of the other components, the system can be upgraded on some job daemons while jobs are being processed on others.  The interface also allows for killing of jobs (k) of any user, as well as setting the wait time to any specified number of hours (w).


Logging

The logging of the system occurs in 2 ways in the /var/log/Peach/ directory.  The first is the logging of STDERR which is output to the pserv.log and pjobd.log files.  Furthermore, logging of CPU usage is sent to cpu_load.log. 

The second form of logging is a hard disk backup of the current state of the server.  The rest of the files in the log directory fall into this category.  It is found both on the machine that is currently running the server and as well as on the program disk.  These files are used for reloading the last known state of the system.



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Updated 2005-02-10, Peter Leong
Updated 2004-11-30, Peter Leong and Bernard Heymann