Hyrax - Starting and stopping the BES

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The besctl command

The besctl command is used to control the BES daemon. For Hyrax version 1.7 and earlier, this the only way to control the BES. Starting with Hyrax 1.8 (release date tentatively set for fall 2011) the Hyrax Admin Interface can be used to start, stop, reconfigure and debug the BES once the master daemon is started using this command. The Hyrax Admin Interface also provides for both hard and soft restarts of Hyrax while the besctl command does not.

The most common uses of besctl

To start and stop the BES, use the besctl command. The besctl command has a number of options, but the most important are the start and stop arguments. To start the BES use:

besctl start

and to stop it, use:

besctl stop

The general form for the besctl command is:

besctl (help|start|stop|restart|status|pids|kill) [options]

where options are:

-i back-end server installation directory
-c use back-end server configuration file CONFIG
-d send debugging for CONTEXT to cerr or <filename>
-h show the help information and exit
-p set port to PORT
-r bes.pid file stored in directory PID_DIR
-s specifies a secure server using SLL authentication
-u set unix socket to UNIX_SOCKET
-v echos version and exit


These options are used only in special circumstances; of them all the -d option to turn on debugging is the most useful. The syntax for run-time debugging/diagnostic output is:

-d "<output sink>,<context 1>, ...,<context n>"

where a typical example would be:

-d "cerr,ascii,netcdf,besdaemon"

which would tell the daemon to send diagnostic output from the ASCII handler, the NetCDF handler and the BES daemon itself to the terminal's standard error output.

About each of the arguments to besctl

The besctl command accepts a total of seven arguments.

help

Display help information for the besctl command

start

Start the BES

stop

Stop the BES. This is a 'hard' stop and any active connections will be dropped.

restart

This is the same as using the stop and start commands separately. If you want to issue a 'soft' restart of Hyrax, use the Hyrax Admin Interface, which will be available in Hyrax 1.8.

status

This returns the master BES daemon process id number and the user id under which it is running.

pids

The BES is actually a collection of processes; use this argument to find the process id numbers for them all.

kill

Sometimes the stop or restart arguments don't work. Use this argument to stop all the processes. The stop command works by sending the TERM signal to the master BES daemon process which then sends that signal to all of the subordinate BES daemon processes, but processes can ignore this signal in certain circumstances. Using the kill argument to besctl sends the KILL signal to all of the processes; KILL cannot be ignored by a process, so this is certain to stop the server.

About the options accepted by besctl

server installation directory

Use the -i option to force besctl to use a specific directory as the server's root directory. This option is useful if you have several BES daemons running on one machine.

-i <directory>

server configuration file

Use the -c option to force the daemon to use a specific bes.conf file instead of the file found at server root/etc/bes/bes.conf

-c <configuration file path>

An alternative to usign this option is to use the BES_CONF environment variable to point to a configuration file. Set the value of the environment variable to the path of the configuration file. Be sure to export the environment variable. Also note that as of Hyrax 1.6, the BES reads a significant amount of configuration information from the server root/etc/bes/conf.d directory. You can disable this by editing the bes.conf file; look for the Includes directive.

debugging

Use the -d option to achieve fine-grained control over the server's diagnostic output. The -d option takes a single double-quoted string which must contain the name of the output sink for the diagnostic information and a comma separated list of 'debug contexts'. The sink may be either an open stream (e.g., cerr) or a file while the contexts are defined by/in the BES source code. All modules define a context that matches their name and you can see this using the help argument to besctl, although most define additional contexts. The best way to find out about the contexts available is to look at the source code for the server.

-d "cerr,besdaemon"

Use the special context all' to see output from all of the contexts. This will produce very verbose output.

help

The -h option prints a short online help message which lists the option switches. Note that this option doesn't work when you supply an argument like start, stop, et c., except for help.

-h

port

Use the -p option to set the port the daemon uses for communication with the Hyrax front-end.

-p <number>

PID file

Use the -r option to tell the BES where to store the master daemon's process id number.

-r <directory>

SLL authentication

Use the -s option to force the server to use SSL authentication. This option is not used with Hyrax. To configure Hyrax for use with SSL, see information about running ht efront-end of the server with SSL. This is typically done by securing a Tomcat or Apache server and is standard procedure used by many general web sites.

unix socket

Use the -u option to force the BES to use a Unix socket for communication with the front-end instead of the TCP socket. We rarely use this.

-u <socket>

verbose

use the -v option to see the version of the bes. The server does not start, ..., et cetera.

-v