Administering a BEA Tuxedo Application at Run Time

Starting Up and Shutting Down an Application

This topic includes the following sections:

The Tasks Involved in Starting Up and Shutting Down an Application

The following flowchart illustrates the tasks required to start up and shut down your BEA Tuxedo application.

Click on each of the following tasks for instructions on completing that task.

How to Set Your Environment

Being able to access the BEA Tuxedo executables and data libraries is essential to the job of managing a BEA Tuxedo application. For example, the commands needed to start up or shut down an application are located in %TUXDIR%\bin on a Windows host machine, and in $TUXDIR/bin on a UNIX host machine.

On Windows

On a Windows host machine, enter the following commands at the command prompt to set up your environment:

set TUXCONFIG=path_name_of_TUXCONFIG_file
set TUXDIR=path_name_of_BEA_Tuxedo_system_root_directory
set APPDIR=path_name_of_BEA_Tuxedo_application_root_directory
set PATH=%APPDIR%;%TUXDIR%\bin;%PATH%

Replace the substitutable strings (italicized) with the absolute pathnames appropriate for your installation.

Windows accesses the required dynamically loadable library files through its PATH variable setting. Specifically, Windows searches for dynamically loadable library files in the following order:

On UNIX

On a UNIX host machine, set and export the following environment variables to set up your environment:

TUXCONFIG=path_name_of_TUXCONFIG_file
TUXDIR=path_name_of_BEA_Tuxedo_system_root_directory
APPDIR=path_name_of_BEA_Tuxedo_application_root_directory
PATH=$APPDIR:$TUXDIR/bin:/bin:$PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$APPDIR:$TUXDIR/lib:/lib:/usr/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export TUXCONFIG TUXDIR APPDIR PATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Replace the substitutable strings (italicized) with the absolute pathnames appropriate for your installation.

How to Create the TUXCONFIG File

Each BEA Tuxedo domain is controlled by a configuration file in which installation-dependent parameters are defined. The text version of the configuration file is referred to as UBBCONFIG.The binary version of the UBBCONFIG file is referred to as TUXCONFIG. As with UBBCONFIG, the TUXCONFIG file may be given any name; the actual name is the device or system filename specified in the TUXCONFIG environment variable.

The tmloadcf(1) command converts the text configuration file to a binary file called TUXCONFIG and writes the new file to the location given in the TUXCONFIG variable. Run the command as follows:

$ tmloadcf [-n] [-y] [-c] [-b blocks] {UBBCONFIG_file | - }

The options shown here perform the following functions:

The -c and -n options do not load the TUXCONFIG file. IPC resources are platform specific. If you use the -c option, check the data sheet for your platform in the BEA Tuxedo Installation Guide to judge whether you must make changes. If you do want to change IPC resources, check the administration documentation for your platform. If the -n option checks for syntax errors in the configuration file, correct the errors before you proceed. (For UBBCONFIG_file, substitute the fully qualified name of your configuration file.)

The -b option takes an argument that limits the number of blocks used to store the TUXCONFIG file. Use it if you are installing TUXCONFIG on a raw disk device that has not been initialized. The option is not recommended if TUXCONFIG is stored in a regular UNIX system file.

How to Start tlisten at All Sites

For a networked application, a listener process must be running on each machine. A networked application is an application that runs on more than one machine, as established by the MODEL MP parameter in the RESOURCES section of the application's UBBCONFIG file.

The port on which the process is listening must be the same as the port specified for NLSADDR in the NETWORK section of the configuration file. On each machine, use the tlisten(1) command, as follows:

tlisten [ -d device ] -l nlsaddr [-u {uid-# | uid-name}] [ -z bits ] [ -Z bits ]

Example: tlisten -l //machine1:6500

tlisten Command Options

How to Manually Propagate the Application-Specific Directories and Files

TUXCONFIG is propagated automatically to all machines in your configuration by the BEA Tuxedo system when you run tmboot(1). There are, however, other files that you need to propagate manually. Following is a list of the files and directories that you need to create for a networked application. First, install the BEA Tuxedo system on the machine.

How to Create a TLOG Device

To create distributed transaction processing, you must have created a global transaction log (TLOG) on each participating machine. To define a TLOG, complete the following steps.

If the TLOGDEVICE is mirrored between two machines, step 4 is not required on the paired machine. To be recoverable, the TLOG should reside on a device that can be mirrored. Because the TLOG is too small (typically, 100 pages) to warrant the allocation of a whole disk partition, the TLOG is commonly stored on the same raw disk slice as the BEA Tuxedo /Q database.

How to Boot the Application

Once all prerequisites have been completed successfully, you can bring up the application using tmboot. Only the administrator who created the TUXCONFIG file can execute tmboot(1).

The application is generally booted from the machine designated as MASTER in the RESOURCES section of the configuration file or the BACKUP acting as the MASTER. The -b option allows some deviation from this rule. For tmboot to find executables, BEA Tuxedo system processes such as the Bulletin Board Liason (BBL) must be located in $TUXDIR/bin. Application servers should be in the directory defined by the APPDIR variable, as specified in the configuration file.

When booting application servers, tmboot uses the CLOPT, SEQUENCE, SRVGRP, SRVID, and MIN parameters from the configuration file. Application servers are booted in the order specified by the SEQUENCE parameter, if SEQUENCE is used. If SEQUENCE is not specified, servers are booted in the order in which they appear in the configuration file. The command line should look something like the following:

$ tmboot  [-g grpname] [-o sequence] [-S] [-A] [-y]

Sequence of tmboot Tasks for a 2-Machine Configuration

To boot the entire configuration, enter the following command:

prompt> tmboot -y

tmboot performs the following tasks:

Sequence of tmboot Tasks for Large Applications (Over 50 Machines)

For relatively large applications (that is, those consisting of over 50 machines), tmboot boots entire machines in a single step rather than performing all the steps used to boot two machines in the default sequence. Following is the optimized sequence of tasks.

How to Shut Down Your Application

Use the tmshutdown(1) command to shut down all or part of a BEA Tuxedo application. The rules for running this command are similar to those for running tmboot(1); tmshutdown is the inverse of tmboot.

When the entire application is shut down, tmshutdown removes the interprocess communication (IPC) resources associated with the BEA Tuxedo system. The options used by tmboot for partial booting (-A, -g, -I, -S, -s, -l, -M, -B) are supported in tmshutdown. The -b option (allowing tmboot to be used from a non-MASTER machine) is not supported for tmshutdown; you must enter the tmshutdown command from the MASTER (or BACKUP MASTER) machine.

To migrate servers, use the -R option. This option shuts down the servers without removing bulletin board entries for them. If a machine is partitioned, run tmshutdown with the -P LMID option on the partitioned machine to shut down the servers on that machine.

tmshutdown does not shut down the administrative server BBL on a machine to which clients are attached. You can use the -c option to override this feature. You need this option for occasions when you must bring down a machine immediately and you cannot contact the clients.

You can use the -w delay option to force a hard shutdown after delay seconds. This option suspends all servers immediately so that additional work cannot be queued. The value of delay should allow time for requests already queued to be serviced. After delay seconds, a SIGKILL signal is sent to the servers. This option enables the administrator to shut down servers that are looping or blocked in application code.

Running tmshutdown

Only the administrator who has written the TUXCONFIG file can execute tmshutdown(1). The application can be shut down only from the machine designated as MASTER in the configuration file. When the BACKUP acts as MASTER, it is considered to be the MASTER for shutdown purposes. (The only exception to this rule is a partitioned machine. By using the -p option, an administrator can run the tmshutdown command from a partitioned machine to shut down the application at that site.)

The order in which application servers are shut down is the reverse of the order specified by the SEQUENCE parameter for them, or the reverse order in which they are listed in the configuration file. If some servers have SEQUENCE numbers and others do not, the unnumbered servers are the first to be shut down, followed by the application servers with SEQUENCE numbers (in reverse order). Finally, administrative servers are shut down.

When an application is shut down, all the IPC resources allocated by the BEA Tuxedo system are removed; tmshutdown does not remove IPC resources allocated by the DBMS.

Using the IPC Tool When an Application Fails to Shut Down Properly

IPC resources are operating system resources, such as message queues, shared memory, and semaphores. When a BEA Tuxedo application shuts down properly with the tmshutdown command, all IPC resources used by the BEA Tuxedo application are removed from the system. In some cases, however, an application may fail to shut down properly and stray IPC resources may remain on the system. When this happens, it may not be possible to reboot the application.

One way to address this problem is to remove IPC resources with a script that invokes the system IPCS command and scan for all IPC resources owned by a particular user account. However, with this method, it is difficult to distinguish among different sets of IPC resources; some may belong to a particular BEA Tuxedo application; and others to applications unrelated to the BEA Tuxedo system. It is important to be able to distinguish among these sets of resources; unintentional removal of IPC resources can severely damage an application.

The BEA Tuxedo IPC tool (that is, the tmipcrm(1) command) enables you to remove IPC resources allocated by the BEA Tuxedo system (that is, for core BEA Tuxedo and Workstation components only) in an active application.

The command to remove IPC resources, tmipcrm(1), resides in TUXDIR/bin. This command reads the binary configuration file (TUXCONFIG), and attaches to the bulletin board using the information in this file. tmipcrm works only on the local server machine; it does not clean up IPC resources on remote machines in a BEA Tuxedo configuration.

To run this command, enter it as follows on the command line:

tmipcrm [-y] [-n] [TUXCONFIG_file]

The IPC tool lists all IPC resources used by the BEA Tuxedo system and gives you the option of removing them.

To remove /Q IPC resources, use the qmadmin(1) ipcrm command.