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:

1. Login to the instrument account on the instrument computer
2. 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

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:

1. Kill all manually started SICS processes through the system kill command
2. Start monit with the command: monit
3. Then monit start all should get everything ship shape again.