Administration Guide

Determining problems with rah:

Here are suggestions on how to handle some problems that you may encounter when you are running rah:

1. rah hangs (or takes a very long time)

   This problem may be caused because:

   • rah has determined that it needs to buffer output, and you did not export RAHCHECKBUF=no therefore before running your command rah has sent a command to all hosts to check the existence of the buffer directory and to create it if it doesn't exist.
   • One or more of the hosts where you are sending your command is not responding. The rsh command will eventually timeout but the timeout interval is quite long, usually about 60 seconds.

2. You have received messages such as:
   1. Login incorrect
   2. Permission denied

   Either one of the hosts does not have the id running rah correctly defined in its .hosts file or the id running rah does not have one of the hosts correctly defined in its .rhosts

3. When running commands in parallel using background rshells, although the commands run and complete within the expected elapsed time at the hosts, rah takes a long time to notice this and put up the shell prompt.

   The id running rah does not have one of the hosts correctly defined in its .rhosts file

4. Although rah runs fine when run from the shell command line, if you run rah remotely using rsh, for example,

       rsh somewher -l $USER db2_kill
   

   rah never completes.

   This is normal. rah starts background monitoring processes which continue to run after it has exited. Those processes will normally persist until all processes associated with the command you ran have themselves terminated. In the case of db2_kill, this means termination of all database managers. You can terminate the monitoring processes by finding the process whose command is rahwait>or and kill <process_id>. Do not specify a signal number - leave to default (to 15).

5. The output from rah is not displayed correctly, or rah incorrectly complains that $RAHBUFNAME does not exist, when multiple commands of rah were issued under the same $RAHUSER.

   This is because multiple concurrent executions of rah are trying to use the same buffer file (ie $RAHBUFDIR/$RAHBUFNAME) for buffering the outputs. To prevent this problem, use a different $RAHBUFNAME for each concurrent rah as, for example in the following ksh:

      export RAHBUFNAME=rahout
      rah ";$command_1" &
      export RAHBUFNAME=rah2out
      rah ";$command_2" &
   

   or use a method which makes the shell choose a unique name automatically such as:

      RAHBUFNAME=rahout.$$ db2_all "....."
   

   Whatever method you use, you must ensure you clean up the buffer files at some point if disk space is limited. rah does not erase a buffer file at the end of execution, although it will erase and then re-use an existing one the next time you specify the same buffer file.

6. You entered

     rah '"print from ()'
   

   and received the message:

   ksh: syntax error at line 1 : `(' unexpected
   

   Prerequisites for the substitution of () and ## are:

   • Use db2_all, not rah
   • Ensure a RAHOSTFILE is used either by exporting RAHOSTFILE or by defaulting to your ~/sqllib/db2nodes.cfg file. Without these prerequisites, rah will leave the () and ## as is. You get an error because the command print from () is not valid.
   • Performance tip when running commands in parallel:

     Use | rather than |& and use || rather than ||& or ; unless you truly need the function provided by & since specifying & requires more rsh commands and therefore degrades performance.

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