WACS: Administration
Contents
Automatic Administration Tasks
One of the significant features of WACS is it's ability to monitor
subscription web sites for updates to your favourite models, and while
these tasks can be done manually "on-demand", they can also be
automated in conjunction with your operating system's timed execution
facilities. For this to work of course, you do need to make sure that
you've added your account details for each site that you want monitored
into the vendor database using wacsvendmgr. You also need to
make sure that each model's identity on that site has been entered as
well; this can be done using the Identity Management mode of the
wacsmodelmgr.
In addition, there are housekeeping programs (eg updatestats) that
should be run regularly to keep the model statistics up to date, even on
systems where the download system is not in active use.
For these systems, the automatic execution system is known as crontab
and it's operation is managed by a somewhat cryptic program also called
crontab. Normally crontab will be running already since it is
used by the operating system itself for housekeeping. It is important to
understand that crontab does not "wake up" a machine that is switched off
or suspended, and so setting to run an overnight job when you turn it off
each evening as you go to bed will not prove useful because the job will
never run. If the machine is left on, as most servers probably will be,
a time in the early hours of the morning will probably be fine; if the
machine is normally switched off overnight, choose a time when the machine
has a good chance of being switched on. The jobs will run in the background
and will not affect other users of the system particularly.
Housekeeping (updatestats)
There is currently only one housekeeping program, updatestats
which updates the model records (statistics, what they do, etc). Generally
I'd recommend running this once per day, just after midnight (modulo the
advice above about making sure the machine will be on at that time). To
do this, as a suitable administrative user, open a terminal window and
type:
% crontab -e
and add the following line to the file:
15 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/updatestats
This instructs crontab to run the program updatestats at quarter
past midnight 0:15 each day; note that the location of the command is
specified in full. If you're not sure where it is, try: which
updatestats or look in the Wacs configuration file for the fsloc
tooldir attribute.
Automatic Download
If you want to make use of the automatic download feature, you need to
enable two more programs to run at a suitable time: refresh
and getarc. Refresh scans registered models and checks for
updates; getarc fetches a number of the updates that refresh has found.
To enable the automatic scanning feature, you need once again to open a
terminal window and add the following line into your crontab:
22 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/refresh
This will cause the refresh command to run at twenty-two minutes
past midnight each day. Once again check the pathname as described above.
Note that by default refresh will only check those models the
Wacs system currently considers to be "Active", ie those who have been
found to have new sets within the last three months or so. An additional
option to refresh, -a allows it to scan all models, including those
marked as dormant. It is recommended to run this occasionally so that it
will double check the dormant models at a much slower rate; you might wish
for instance to check dormant models twice a week, and to do this you would
add a second crontab entry of:
42 0 * * 2,5 /usr/local/bin/refresh -a
Once refresh has been run, any newly discovered sets will be registered
in the WACS system - they can be examined using the Download list
wacsdnllist or are listed per-model in the detailed model
page wacsmodelpage. In order for them to be downloaded automatically
you will also have to invoke the getarc command at some suitable point -
I choose 6:45 in the morning. To set this up, you add the following
to the crontab in the same way as above:
45 6 * * * /usr/local/bin/getarc
The cron command when it runs will automatically email you with the
details of what happened for each of the commands you've set it up to
run.
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