FATMEN

Last update - 11th August 1999. Y2K - Problems

These pages describe some general details concerning the FATMEN service at CERN.

For information regarding the use of the FATMEN package itself, please see the FATMEN documentation.

See also the old (no longer maintained) web pages here

Introduction

The FATMEN service is run on an IBM machine, with nodename fatcat.cern.ch.

The various FATMEN catalogs are kept on the /fatmen filesystem, which is NFS-exported and should be NFS-mounted on any system requiring access to the FATMEN catalog.

For each experiment (e.g. DELPHI, L3, OPAL etc.) there is a subdirectory which contains the catalog for that experiment and associated configuration files, e.g. 

fatcat:/fatmen/fmdelphi (1) ls
bad/              fatlogs/          fatmen.loccodes   fatserv.log       fmdelphi.names
cern.fatrz        fatmen.accounts   fatmen.medtypes   fatserv.sh        toccsrs.in2p3.fr/
done/             fatmen.acl        fatserv           fatsrv            todo/
fatcat:/fatmen/fmdelphi (2)
The purpose of each of these files is described below.

List of contacts (where known)

Trouble-shooting

Currently, FATMEN runs on a RS6000 machine, shared with HEPDB. The node name is shd15 with aliases fatcat and hepdb.

Any user may request a restart of a server by creating a signal.start file in the todo directory for their experiment.

e.g. to restart the server for DELPHI, type: 

touch /fatmen/fmdelphi/todo/signal.start

The following information is for service managers only.

There are the following known problems:

Explanation of FATMEN files

FATMEN programs and scripts

These are kept in the directory /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/@sys/bin and /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts.

Programs

ls /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/@sys/bin
fatback  fathead  fatsend  fatserv

Scripts

The scripts contain a brief comment explaining their function and are described in the user documentation.

Many are run from cron as user jamie. 

sp020:/fatmen/fmdelphi (11) crontab -l
#
# Start FATMEN backups at 02:00
#
0 2 * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatback.sh >> /fatmen/fatback/logs 2>&1
#
# Check for servers that have been stopped
#
0 6 * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatchk > /dev/null 2>&1
#
# Restart any servers with a signal.restart file
#
3,18,33,48 4-23 * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatrestart > /dev/null 2>&1
#
# Remove old ZZ files
#
0 5,15 * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatzz > /dev/null 2>&1
#
# Check for backlogs
#
0 6,16 * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatqueue > /dev/null 2>&1
#
# Check that filesystems are not too full
#
0 0 * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatdf > /dev/null 2>&1
#
# Check that none of the servers have died
#
0 * * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatok > /dev/null 2>&1
#
# Special check for fmsend
#
30 * * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatsendchk > /dev/null 2>&1
#
# Clean /fatlogs0 and /fatlogs1 filesystems
#
0 5 * * 3 /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatlog_clean > /fatlogs/clean.log 2>&1
#
# Look for bad DELPHI files
#
30 7 * * * /afs/cern.ch/project/fatmen/scripts/fatbad > /dev/null 2>&1

A few are also run from root: 

1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * * chmod o+rw /fatmen/fmdelphi/todo/* >/dev/null 2>/dev/null
1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * * chmod o+rw /fatmen/fmopal/todo/* >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Y2K Information

Like many CERNLIB programs, FATMEN relies on the DATIME routine to handle dates and times. As is described here, this routine returns the date in YYMMDD format through the argument list.

FATMEN stores dates and times in 3 fields for each entry - the date and time that an entry was catalogued, the corresponding file created, and when it was last accessed. All of these fields are optional.

Two of the commands in the FATMEN shell, SCAN and SEARCH, permit date and time ranges for the above three fields to be specified.

It is not possible to specify a range that crosses a century boundary. Hence, if a listing corresponding to all entries catalogued from e.g. 31-DEC-1999 until 01-JAN-2000 inclusive, two searches will have to be issued.

As this feature is very rarely used, no changes to FATMEN are foreseen.
(Some cosmetic changes, e.g. to print dates in I6.6 format in FMSHOW, have been made).

The basic functionality has been tested on a Y2K machine, as follows:

These tests were successful.

Last update by CERN Program Library