WACS: Administration

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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.

*nix like systems: Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, etc

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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