Running and Restarting SICS
Checking, Starting, Stopping, Restarting SICS
This is so easy that it is only mastered by the choosen few ;-) It is basically
two steps:
- Login to the instrument account on the instrument computer
- Perform the desired operation with one of the monit commands below
- Check
- monit summary, should yield a list of all SICS processes and their state
- Start
- monit start sicsserver
- Stop
- monit stop sicsserver
- Restart
- monit restart sicsserver
If this fails for some reason, read the next section for background information and follow
the instructions in the section Sorting Process Chaos
SICS Process Control
This section contains background information how SICS processes are
monitored and controlled. The first thing to know is that a running SICS
installation consists of multiple processes:
- SICS server
- The SICS server
- SerPortServer
- A deprecated server for accessing serial ports. It still required to access serial ports
with a deprectaed protocol on some instruments
- sync
- The file synchronisation server which listens for the UDP messages from SICS
- sea
- A sample environment server
- graph
- A server for sample environment graphs
In order to monitor and restart all these processes the tool monit
is used. Because monit can do it, it is also used to alert of disk space problems and for monitoring the
presence of hardware such as histogram memories.
The monit demon is run from the instrument user account. Its configuration in monit syntax lives in the
file .monitrc. Do not edit this file manually: there is a file monitconfig in the instrument account home
directory which contains keywords for the various things to configure. The program monitint then generates the
.monitrc file. There is also a directory monitfiles which contains files and scripts required for SINQ's use
of monit.
Monit has a few other interesting commands:
- monit summary
- Shows a summary of the things watched by monit and their state
- monit status
- Shows a detailed listing of the status of the items watched by monit
The monit demon is started through the system init system when the instrument computer is booted.
Sorting Process Chaos
Sometimes the monit demon fails to start when the system reboots. Or users start servers
manually. This, of course, confuses monit. This state can be diagnosed by checking the output
of monit summary. If there is not item list but rather something like monit is not running, this
problem is to be solved. And it is easy to solve:
- Kill all manually started SICS processes through the system kill command
- Start monit with the command: monit
- Then monit start all should get everything ship shape again.
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This page last changed on 25-Sep-2014 06:46:55 UTC by MarkusZolliker.
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