Administration

This section provides information about the state of DirX after its installation on the Windows and UNIX platforms and the prerequisite procedures, if any, that you must follow prior to setting up the directory as described in the Administration Guide.

Database Administration

DirX cannot run before you have performed the database configuration and initialization. See the Administration Guide chapter "Understanding DBAM and Storage Management" and the Disc Dimensioning Guide for details.

After initial installation, you can set up the directory as described in the Administration Guide. Sample scripts for the initial steps are provided in the directory <install path>\scripts.

DirX uses the Windows event service to report status (NOTICE) and warning (WARNING) messages. You can view these messages with the Windows Event Viewer, selecting Application Log.

Administration on Linux

This section provides information about DirX administration on UNIX platforms.

General Procedures

After successful installation, the DirX directory service and the LDAP server will not be running.

You installed DirX under a user id, you must log in as this user to administer DirX. The DirX installation has included a call of the shell script .dirxrc into your .profile script to set or extend the environment variables DIRX_INST_PATH, PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Please ensure that the following environment variable is set as follows:

LANG=C

If it is not set automatically, you should add this line to your .dirxrc file.

The following environment variables must be set as shown and exported:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/<dirx-account-homedir>/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PATH=$PATH:/<dirx-account-homedir>/bin

Now you can start DirX with the command:

dirxadm -c "start"

You can check whether DirX is running using the following command:

$ ps -ea | grep dirx

After you have started DirX, you can set up the directory as described in the DirX Administration Guide. Sample scripts for the initial steps are provided in the directory <install path>/scripts.

Additional Procedures on SuSE Linux ES

Prevent Changes of Device Permissions.

A reboot of SuSE Linux results in changes to the permissions of raw devices in /dev. These changes are performed by the system.

In order to prevent changes during reboot, you have to extend the file /etc/init.d/boot.local with the following command:

      chmod g+w <list of all devices used by DBAM>

Here is an example for such an extension to the /etc/init.d/boot.local file:
# /dev/hdb5 and /dev/hdb6 are used by the DirX Service

chmod g+w /dev/hdb5 /dev/hdb6

File descriptor limits on Linux

On Linux the file /etc/security/limits.conf defines the Hard and Softlimits for the max number of Filedescriptors per process, e.g.

 *           soft    nofile          8192
 *           hard    nofile          8192
 # End of file

As DirX Directory 9.1 processes are supporting up to 8k sockets the limits can be set as shown above.

Additional Procedures on SuSE Linux ES 15 or Red Hat Linux ES 8 and above

In newer Linux platforms (Red Hat Linux ES 8 and above, SuSE Linux ES 15 and above), in kernel version >= 4.18 and glibc version >= 2.15 a new memory management method was introduced which is sometimes referred as 'using per thread memory arenas'. With this new method the memory consumption of the DirX processes can increase rapidly, as the OS keeps a once used but already freed memory occupied for the process for possible later reuse.
Number of those arenas defaults to (8 * number of cores) on a 64-bit Linux system. If the memory increase of the DirX processes is not acceptable in your environment, and you want a much lower memory consumption footprint for those processes, you can define a lower limit (e.g.: 2) for the number of usable memory arenas. To do so, you should add the following environment variable to your .dirxrc file and also export it: MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2; export MALLOC_ARENA_MAX. This change will be effective after the next restart of the DirX processes.