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Duty3G/Duty3G 5.1 Release Notes

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Contents

Overview and Features

Duty3G

Duty3G V5.1 encourages sound management practices by making it possible to perform the regular operations workload on UNIX, Linux and Windows servers in a way that is efficient, reliable, verifiable, compliant, and repeatable whilst protecting privileged user access. With duty3G you define the command or commands that carry out a process, you assign the privilege to the duty, and then assign the duty to the user.


New features in Duty3G V5.1

Key features of the new release are:

Enhanced operations

  • for a selected class
  • that run on a selected host
  • for a selected users' role

Improved auditing

  • by selected time period
  • that have ended in error
  • for selected duty
  • for selected user
  • for selected mode

Documentation


Installation Requirements

Software prerequisites

To install and run Duty3G V5.1 on a host, you must have:


Disk space required

Software Approximately 1 MB in the duty3G home directory.
Temporary Files While installing duty3G: less than 1 MB, to hold a copy of the software distribution.
While duty3G is running: less than 1 MB in /tmp.
Audit Trail For the duty3G audit trail, about 10 - 50 MB in the system spool area. The actual amount will depend on the activity on your system (e.g. how many duties are run), and how often you archive and delete the log files.
Compliance Reports For the duty3G compliance reports, about 5 - 20 MB in the system spool area.


Running Remote Duties on Windows

The current duty3G release supports running remote duties on Windows hosts which have the EWC (Enterprise Windows Client) V3.1.1 installed. This product may be purchased separately.


Upgrading COSduty 3.0

Figure 13 — Installation messages—upgrading from COSduty 3.0
Figure 13 — Installation messages—upgrading from COSduty 3.0
  1. Download the distribution file to /tmp on the target host.
  2. From the Configuration menu, select COSmanager configuration > Applications.
  3. Select Application > Install.
  4. Press Choose. You will see a list of the applications that can be installed. Choose the entry titled duty3G, and press Accept.
  5. COSmanager copies the duty3G files from the distribution file to the target directory, updates the duty3G audit trail and creates the duty3g compliance report directory.
  6. To migrate your existing COSduty 3.0 database to the newly installed version press Copy. Your existing database is copied and updated with new table columns.
  7. To make the newly install duty3G the default version press Accept, then press Continue.
Any automatic duties are added or re-added to the cosmos crontab.
This completes the upgrade installation. You must now restart COSmanager for the new version of duty3G to come into affect.


Technical Notes: Using duty3G V5.1

This section contains some technical notes and tips about using duty3G V5.1.


Temporary or trial licensing

Duty3G may be issued with a temporary license for use in trials or demonstrations. Temporary licenses have an in-built expiry date. You must obtain a permanent license or a new temporary license from your COSmanager distributor to keep using duty3G after the expiry date.



Note
Duty3G won’t install if the license key is due to expire within the next 7 days. In this case you will need to obtain a new license key from your COSmanager distributor.


COSmanager framework version required for duty3G V5.1

Duty V5.1 requires COSmanager V4.2.5 or newer.


Schedules and Schedtime

Duty3G V5.1 the newer, more generalised scheduling provided in COSmanager V4.2.X. These include the datelist and schedule tables, which supersede the schedtime table (as used in COSduty V3.0). The schedtime table is now deprecated. It is important to note that the schedtime and schedule tables are maintained separately, and so changes to one table will not be reflected in the other. You should only maintain the schedule and datelist tables. You can do this via:


Audit Trails and Compliance Reports

When duty3G is installed, two new audit trails are created: duty_log and duty_compl. By default, these are created in the system spool area (usually /usr/spool or /var/spool). The duty_log audit trail is the primary audit trail, recording all user actions, such as:

The duty_compl audit trail is used to store all the Daily Duty Compliance Reports created, by default, at midnight on a daily basis.

Depending on the volume of duties run, these directories may become large, so it is important that audit trail cycling be configured correctly for your site to prevent these files from growing unbounded. By default the audit trails are cycled:

duty_log monthly, retaining up to 15 archive copies
duty_compl daily, retaining each report for up to one year.


New Features in this Release

Generalised Calendaring for Automatic Duties

Duty3G V5.1 uses the new schedule and datelist tables which provide more features than the old schedtime table:



Note
As with schedtime, scheduling of automatic jobs is still implemented via CRON.


Notes Facility

You can now attach a HTML or text file of documentation to a duty. This file can be viewed by the user from the duty console at any time.



Note
There is no facility provided to create notes files—you can simply use your favourite text editor (vi, emacs etc.). Notes files should be created in the duty_5.1/local/notes directory.


Grouping and Ordering Duties

Previously you may prefixed duties with a Class or Category (for example, STACKER: Inventory media) so that like duties were listed together on the duty console. Now you can define a duty a class, or you can move a selected group to a class using Duty3G configuration > Duty > Move to class.

Previously, you may also have prefixed duties with a number series so that they will display in the duty console in the order they should be performed. Now you can re-order duties, using drag and drop, into what ever order you like using Duty3G configuration > Duty > Reorder. Duties can only be re-ordered for a given Class.



Note
Overdue duties will still display at the top of the duty list. Dependencies of duties will always display just above that duty.


Known Problems in this Release

Duty3G Monitor Refresh

The duty3G console has been designed to refresh the data automatically within 5 seconds of any duty or status change. It has been observed on some platforms that very occasionally the duty3G console may miss a status change, and hence it does not refresh itself correctly. If you find this to be the case, select View > Outstanding (or whatever view you are in), which will force a refresh.