Duty3G/Duty3G 5.1 Release Notes

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Overview and Features

Duty3G

Duty3G 5.1 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 5.1

Key features of the new release are:

Enhanced operations

• Enhanced schedules, for example, a Weekday schedule can exclude public holidays and end of month.
• Duties may be assigned to a duty list. Duty lists are a way of grouping similar duties together, or a way of creating a to-do' type list.
• Duties within a duty list can be placed in the order they should be performed.
• A user can be requested to re-authenticate before running certain duties giving added security.
• Duties can be auto disabled and/or auto re-enabled on given dates. This is useful during system roll-outs or migration projects.
• A duty is run asynchronously, meaning if you have a long running duty, you can still run other duties.
• As a duty is performed, that duty is now locked so no other user can run the same duty with possible undesirable results.
• End user's can set their own default start-up view (at-request or outstanding duties) and start-up duty list, along with a reminder period before duties become overdue.
• Upcoming scheduled duties for a selected day or date in the future can be viewed – “What has to be done on Friday?”. This is also useful for Administrators to check that duties have been scheduled correctly, for example, making sure certain duties are not scheduled for Christmas Day.
• You can filter your view of duties:

• for a selected duty list
• that run on a selected host
• for a selected users' role.

• The run history of a selected duty can be viewed over various date periods.

Improved auditing

• Filtering has been added to make viewing the Duty audit trail more meaningful:

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

• Duty audit trail entries are now colour coded to make it easier to spot abnormal entries.
• Duty compliance reports are generated daily and can be viewed at any time. These reports highlight failed, missed and skipped duties – exceptions that affect operations compliance.

Documentation

• A HTML or text document can be associated with a duty, so end users can see what Policies and Procedures the duty is supporting.
• The user guide, release notes and other documentation can be viewed via your favourite browser.

Installation Requirements

Software prerequisites

To install and run duty3G 5.1 on a host, you must have:

• COSmanager 4.2.5 or newer already installed on the host (see the COSmanager User Guide for instructions)
• a duty3G distribution
• a valid license key for this host (see your COSmanager distributor if you don’t have a valid license key)
• sufficient disk space
• COSmanager Manager access, or equivalent
• the ability to open a root shell

Disk space required

Running Remote Duties on Windows

The current duty3G release supports running remote duties on Windows hosts which have the EWC (Enterprise Windows Client) 3.1.1 installed. This product may be purchased separately.

Upgrading COSduty 3.0

Figure 1 — 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 5.1, 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 installed 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 5.1

This section contains some technical notes and tips about using duty3G 5.1.

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 5.1

Duty3G 5.1 requires COSmanager 4.2.5 or newer.

Schedules and Schedtime

Duty3G 5.1 uses the newer, more generalised scheduling provided in COSmanager 4.2 releases. These include the datelist and schedule tables, which supersede the schedtime table (as used in COSduty 3.0). 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:

• Duty3G configuration > Tools > Schedules , or
• COSmanager configuration > Other tables > Schedule .

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:

• running a duty, noting the exit status;
• marking a duty as done;
• any added user comments;
• re-authentication failures;
• attempts to run disabled duties.

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:

• You can create named datelists, which, as the name implies, contain lists of arbitrary dates which can be used to either be included or excluded from a schedule.
• You can write your own program or script to determine if the current date and time is to be included in the schedule.

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

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 with a Duty List, or you can move a selected group of duties to a Duty List using Duty3G configuration > Duty > Move to duty list .

Previously, you may also have prefixed duties with a sequence number 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 duty list .

	Note
	You must first change your view for the duty list to be re-ordered using Duty3G configuration > View > For duty list .

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

Duty locking

Startup view

Disabling and enabling duties

Viewing upcomping duties

Re-authentication

Viewing the duty audit trail

Daily duty compliance reports

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.

Known Problems in this Release

Duty3G Console 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.