Stop Doors Databases

SystemAdmin - Thu Mar 12 13:28:42 EDT 2009
They will survive few minutes on their own if you do nothing, but the clients will complain about lost database connectivity with a dialog box quite soon as DOORS clients check the connectivity. Of course this will happen sooner if you try to save a module or otherwise try to access the database.

kbmurphy - Thu Mar 12 14:51:38 EDT 2009
Or even better, if they happen to be saving a module at the exact time that you stop the service, you risk data corruption....

Of course this is more likely to happen on really large, important modules.

SystemAdmin - Fri Mar 13 04:56:24 EDT 2009
Thanks,

Is there any process to respect before to stop the database?
If a doors client session is still opened when I stop the server, the data can be corrupted. I need to stop doors server to backup the database and re-launch doors. When the doors server will be alive after backup, the clients will reconnect automatically ? Or I must force client to disconnect doors before backup ?

mcnairk - Fri Mar 13 08:25:34 EDT 2009

• Send a bulletin to all users 24 hours before the outage
• 5 minutes before send a broadcast message
• Force out anyone still logged on (too bad)
• Disable user logon
• Stop DOORS
• Take backup (assume you mean a copy of the windows or unix database files)
• Start DOORS
• Re-enable logon
• Send user bulletin

SystemAdmin - Tue Mar 17 05:16:58 EDT 2009
Thanks for your informations.

When I talk of backup, I mean to save all content of .../doors/data/
I wanted to know if it was possible to backup with user online but it seems impossible. It will be a backup using fbackup on HP-Ux operating system.

We have already a lot of problems with users who stay connected when the leave their session. And so there is no more license available. We regularly ask user to disconnect doors when they don't use it and the don't do it so if I ask them to disconnect every evening... I am sure every morning I will have problem with doors elements lock by backup, not backuped or corrupted because open during backup. And also clients may have problems to reconnect when doors server will be up. Will they reconnect without reboot ? or just restart doors client ?
I would like to avoid to force clients to log out. Files can be corrupted and it is not safe.

mcnairk - Tue Mar 17 10:28:01 EDT 2009
Access to my DOORS db is through Citrix which allows me to set an idle timeout so that users are logged out automatically after half an hour. That way when my IT dept run their archive in the early morning there is guaranteed to be no-one logged in.

You could keep track of users who consistently leave themselves logged in and send a warning email to them, copying their manager.

Ken.

SystemAdmin - Tue Mar 17 22:14:15 EDT 2009
Hi Ken,

When you say logged out after an idle time - do you mean logged out of the CITRIX session or the user is logged out of an active DOORS session. The reason I ask is that as far as I know DOORS does not have an idle time log out feature and if it's the CITRIX session that is being terminated, then this does not elegantly log the user off from DOORS, it just forces the DOORS client to close regardless of what state it is in. The result being that the user may have had modules opened in an edit state at the time and this will leave residual locks all over the place.

mcnairk - Wed Mar 18 10:00:36 EDT 2009
It's a Windows Terminal Services feature: Start/Programs/Administrative Tools/Terminal Services Configuration/Connections->ICA-tcp->Right click->Properties->Sessions->set the following:
idle:
End a disconnected session: 10 minutes
Idle session limit 30 minutes
When session limit is reached or connection is broken: End session

mcnairk - Wed Mar 18 10:02:52 EDT 2009
Sorry, my previos posting got prematurely sent. I forgot to mention that this must log you out of DOORS sanely since I have never seen an instance of residual locks or corrupted modules.

Ken.

SystemAdmin - Wed Mar 18 19:31:15 EDT 2009
Hi Ken,

I recommend highly that you have a closer look at this with your local CITRIX guru's. I know that CITRIX sits on top of Windows Terminal Services and having used Terminal Services and DOORS in a past life, I know that there can be complications with forcibly terminating sessions whilst an application like DOORS is active.

According to the CITRIX guru's at the company I'm currently contracting with - when a CITRIX session is terminated, it will first attempt to elegantly close all open applications down in the same way that a user might select the applications File>Exit\Close\Logoff menu function or selects the "X" icon in the top right hand corner of the application window. If that fails because the application itself has a component open that needs to be saved, like a modified MSWord document or a DOORS module that has been modified but not saved, then it will forcibly shut the application down in the same way that the windows Task Manager can be used to forcibly kill applications that may have locked up. The result being that unsaved data will of course be lost, but if the application happened to be in the process of doing any back-office processes at the time, this can lead to a corruption of the client application itself, and if this back-office stuff involved any interactions with a database, then data on the DB can also be affected in an adverse way.

See if this makes sense to your local guru's - it wouldn't be the first time that IT guru's don't agree with eachother :-)