Archive for March, 2020

The Athonite Monks in Holy Mount Athos serves an All Night Vigil prayer to God to stop Coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic

Saturday, March 28th, 2020

Holy-Mount-Athos-call-for-prayer-for-delivery-of-the-terrible-Coronavirus-COVID-19-All-monasteries-pray-all-night-for-healing-of-mankind

In the Eastern Orthodox World to which my homeland Bulgaria belongs is deeply saddened and worried about the all time worsening situation with the New Worldwide pandemics which caused suffering and death to already thousands of people. We the Orthodox Christians have the rule that if you can't manage a problem you have to pray God to fix the problem and repent and try to fix what is at your power. This is exactly what pushed the Monks from Biggest on Earth Monk Republic situated on an Island near Greece the Holy Mount Athos to create a All Monasteries Night Vigil for concillation of the The God the Holy Trinity – The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit with the mankind who has done a terrible deeds over the last 30 years against Gods well known law. 

All kind of well known and prohibited sins about which the Holy Church, The Saint Writtings, Church Tradition and The Holy Bible warned us would cause a mass suffering, deaths and a havoc, that their unfollowing will bring. As the warnings and signs given by God to mankind in the form of various Cataclysms especially visible in Italy over the last few years and in virtually all countries has been ignored and the attention of the people was falsely led to material stuff and for the never ending consumer needs by the spiritually highly blind mankind, well it is not strange the payback for the Godlessness of mankind is at hand with the quickly spreading new infectious disease codenamed Coronavirus COVID-19.

Of course atheists reject that and they are giving the result of the Coronavirus to Biological Warfare / animal origin or simply a human hygiene breach, but nomatter that for anyone that has the desire to see it, it is clear that what is happening is one of the many God's mercies to mankind. 

As over the centuries many times we were send the Lord, other misfortunes wars and epidemics as an attempt to save us and bring up our eyes out of the material things which are doomed to be gone one day to the Heavenly and All time lasting spiritual things.
Since the boom of the COVID-19 pandemics, Monks from Holy Mount Athos has made a Call to all Orthodox Christians world wide from All the Holy Eastern Orthodox country 14 Churches and every Orthodox Christian on Earth to read every day at 21:00 o'clock psalms and a special prayers to The well Known helper in Epidemics and Deadly diaseses Saint Haralambos (Св. Харалампий) / Saint Charalampos of Magnesia on the Maeander (Greek city in Ionia so called Asia Minor).

Saint-Haralampij-Saint-Charalambos-Freska_ot_Sv._Ilija_vo_Melnica_11-1

and the Mother of God (Theotokos) called Acathist to Panagia ( Всецарица ) Pantanassa – a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary from the holy and great Monastery of Vatopedi, Mount Athos, Greece depicting the Theotokos enthroned and holding her son Lord Jesus Christ.

PanagiaPantanassa-Vsecarica-Miracle-making-icon-Holy-Mounth-Athos-Vatopedi-convent

As the result of this Pandemics would be a prison like state for humanity economics and a decay of civillization as we know it and the clear realization of the Monks on Holy Athos whose spiritual seeing has been widely open to see the things happening on earth such as they're and the overall late temptations within the Church and the actions of some of the Hierarchs that are trying to destroy the unity and love we had for the last 2020 years …

The athonites today decided to pray all night long continuously as they do on a Big Christian feasts such as Resurrection, Nativity and Dormition etc. (which by the way for the Athos island are relatively common but all monasteries all Night vigil together is unique and only happened in most harsh times in human history, where full spiritual backup was necessery).


In each and every monastery just like in every Holy Liturgy served we pray for the inceasingly praying for the sick with Coronavirus, the lonely, the suffering the hungry, the saddened, people in pay for our parents, grandma, grandpas, sons daughters all Nations the God-fearing governmental powers and us the childs of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church.
 

This prayer is to be streamed straight from the Monasteries is to be streamed online for everyone who can to be unite to become part of the prayer by listening it and secretly repeating deep in his heart the prayer that is said to be giving the highest goods on earth, the so called Jesus Prayer.

This prayer is very simple and the long version os if consists of the words "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Blessed God, have mercy of me the sinner!".
The shorter one is simply "Lord Jesus Christ Have mercy on me", and the shortest one is "Lord Have Mercy".
Monks on Athos depending on their nationality repeat "Lord Have Mercy, Lord Have Mercy, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me …" in Greek Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, Greek, Georgian, Russian etc. praying for themselves and benefitting from the spiritual well of Eternity spreading this Grace through themselves for the world.

Christ-healing-the-paralytic-eastern-orthodox-christian-icon

Lets not forget that the Holy Bible and The experience from the Church history and tradition, tells us about multiple epidemics such as Black Death who were destroyed by many miracles for the humility and prayers of the saintly man and the merfiness of Christ and his Holy Mother The Holy Theotoks Virgin Mary and numerous Saints. 

It is in the Church tradition in this heavy times of pestilence to make Lithia (Holy Cross Procession, Procession with Miracle making icons, Holy relics from saints) has been used to put an end to the diseases and the God's grace which has been attarcted for the faith of People and their timely repentance stopped the diseases, this can be checked in multiple ancient manuscripts and history books, written by various historions.

Also the story of the paralytic, the blindly born, the lepper, the deaf and innumerous other sick people is found in the Bible and we read that they were easily healed by the savior, so we need to come back to our faith, which we have changed with the Friday lustful enjoyment meet in Discos, Caffeterias, Bars Cinema, Theather and kind of spiritually unhealthy and most of time unusuable activities from the perspective of the Eternal Soul

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that this difficult for every living soul situation happened exactly during the time of the Great Lent in which the whole Church is praying to God for forgiveness of the multitude of sins done since the last year Lent time …

Let us pray that this terrible disease who is physically separating us, do on the contrary unite us and bring us spiritual-growth, Knowledge of God, turning out from the sinful habits, thoughts and deeds to do what is pleasant good and wonderful as the Bible says and which has been the ultimate reason why we Human were created in the Beginning.

Lord Jesus Christ son of the Blessed God have mercy on us the Sinners !!!! Lord Jesus Save and Heal the Sick, protect the Healthy, give us repentance, give us your love and strenght, forgive us our terrible sins, be with us always until the End of Ages and in all Eternity !

Amen

 

Find when cron.daily cron.weekly and cron.monthly run on Redhat / CentOS / Debian Linux and systemd-timers

Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

Find-when-cron.daily-cron.monthly-cron.weekly-run-on-Redhat-CentOS-Debian-SuSE-SLES-Linux-cron-logo

 

The problem – Apache restart at random times


I've noticed today something that is occuring for quite some time but was out of my scope for quite long as I'm not directly involved in our Alert monitoring at my daily job as sys admin. Interestingly an Apache HTTPD webserver is triggering alarm twice a day for a short downtime that lasts for 9 seconds.

I've decided to investigate what is triggering WebServer restart in such random time and investigated on the system for any background running scripts as well as reviewed the system logs. As I couldn't find nothing there the only logical place to check was cron jobs.
The usual
 

crontab -u root -l


Had no configured cron jobbed scripts so I digged further to check whether there isn't cron jobs records for a script that is triggering the reload of Apache in /etc/crontab /var/spool/cron/root and /var/spool/cron/httpd.
Nothing was found there and hence as there was no anacron service running but /usr/sbin/crond the other expected place to look up for a trigger even was /etc/cron*

 

1. Configured default cron execution times, every day, every hour every month

 

# ls -ld /etc/cron.*
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 feb 27 10:54 /etc/cron.d/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 dec 27 10:55 /etc/cron.daily/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 dec  7 23:04 /etc/cron.hourly/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 dec  7 23:04 /etc/cron.monthly/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 dec  7 23:04 /etc/cron.weekly/

 

After a look up to each of above directories, finally I found the very expected logrorate shell script set to execute from /etc/cron.daily/logrotate and inside it I've found after the log files were set to be gzipped and moved to execute WebServer restart with:

systemctl reload httpd 

 

My first reaction was to ponder seriously why the script is invoking systemctl reload httpd instead of the good oldschool

apachectl -k graceful

 

But it seems on Redhat and CentOS since RHEL / CentOS version 6.X onwards systemctl reload httpd is supposed to be identical and a substitute for apachectl -k graceful.
Okay the craziness of innovation continued as obviously the reload was causing a Downtime to be visible in the Zabbix HTTPD port Monitoring graph …
Now as the problem was identified the other logical question poped up how to find out what is the exact timing scheduled to run the script in that unusual random times each time ??
 

2. Find out cron scripts timing Redhat / CentOS / Fedora / SLES

 

/etc/cron.{daily,monthly,weekly} placed scripts's execution method has changed over the years, causing a chaos just like many Linux standard things we know due to the inclusion of systemd and some other additional weird OS design changes. The result is the result explained above scripts are running at a strange unexpeted times … one thing that was intruduced was anacron – which is also executing commands periodically with a different preset frequency. However it is considered more thrustworhty by crond daemon, because anacron does not assume the machine is continuosly running and if the machine is down due to a shutdown or a failure (if it is a Virtual Machine) or simply a crond dies out, some cronjob necessery for overall set environment or application might not run, what anacron guarantees is even though that and even if crond is in unworking defunct state, the preset scheduled scripts will still be served.
anacron's default file location is in /etc/anacrontab.

A standard /etc/anacrontab looks like so:
 

[root@centos ~]:# cat /etc/anacrontab
# /etc/anacrontab: configuration file for anacron
 
# See anacron(8) and anacrontab(5) for details.
 
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
# the maximal random delay added to the base delay of the jobs
RANDOM_DELAY=45
# the jobs will be started during the following hours only
START_HOURS_RANGE=3-22
 
#period in days   delay in minutes   job-identifier   command
1    5    cron.daily        nice run-parts /etc/cron.daily
7    25    cron.weekly        nice run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
@monthly 45    cron.monthly        nice run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

 

START_HOURS_RANGE : The START_HOURS_RANGE variable sets the time frame, when the job could started. 
The jobs will start during the 3-22 (3AM-10PM) hours only.

  • cron.daily will run at 3:05 (After Midnight) A.M. i.e. run once a day at 3:05AM.
  • cron.weekly will run at 3:25 AM i.e. run once a week at 3:25AM.
  • cron.monthly will run at 3:45 AM i.e. run once a month at 3:45AM.

If the RANDOM_DELAY env var. is set, a random value between 0 and RANDOM_DELAY minutes will be added to the start up delay of anacron served jobs. 
For instance RANDOM_DELAY equels 45 would therefore add, randomly, between 0 and 45 minutes to the user defined delay. 

Delay will be 5 minutes + RANDOM_DELAY for cron.daily for above cron.daily, cron.weekly, cron.monthly config records, i.e. 05:01 + 0-45 minutes

A full detailed explanation on automating system tasks on Redhat Enterprise Linux is worthy reading here.

!!! Note !!! that listed jobs will be running in queue. After one finish, then next will start.
 

3. SuSE Enterprise Linux cron jobs not running at desired times why?


in SuSE it is much more complicated to have a right timing for standard default cron jobs that comes preinstalled with a service 

In older SLES release /etc/crontab looked like so:

 

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
HOME=/

# run-parts
01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly


As time of writting article it looks like:

 

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/lib/news/bin
MAILTO=root
#
# check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly, and cron.monthly
#
-*/15 * * * *   root  test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1

 

 


This runs any scripts placed in /etc/cron.{hourly, daily, weekly, monthly} but it may not run them when you expect them to run. 
/usr/lib/cron/run-crons compares the current time to the /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.{time} file to determine if those jobs need to be run.

For hourly, it checks if the current time is greater than (or exactly) 60 minutes past the timestamp of the /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly file.

For weekly, it checks if the current time is greater than (or exactly) 10080 minutes past the timestamp of the /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly file.

Monthly uses a caclucation to check the time difference, but is the same type of check to see if it has been one month after the last run.

Daily has a couple variations available – By default it checks if it is more than or exactly 1440 minutes since lastrun.
If DAILY_TIME is set in the /etc/sysconfig/cron file (again a suse specific innovation), then that is the time (within 15minutes) when daily will run.

For systems that are powered off at DAILY_TIME, daily tasks will run at the DAILY_TIME, unless it has been more than x days, if it is, they run at the next running of run-crons. (default 7days, can set shorter time in /etc/sysconfig/cron.)
Because of these changes, the first time you place a job in one of the /etc/cron.{time} directories, it will run the next time run-crons runs, which is at every 15mins (xx:00, xx:15, xx:30, xx:45) and that time will be the lastrun, and become the normal schedule for future runs. Note that there is the potential that your schedules will begin drift by 15minute increments.

As you see this is very complicated stuff and since God is in the simplicity it is much better to just not use /etc/cron.* for whatever scripts and manually schedule each of the system cron jobs and custom scripts with cron at specific times.


4. Debian Linux time start schedule for cron.daily / cron.monthly / cron.weekly timing

As the last many years many of the servers I've managed were running Debian GNU / Linux, my first place to check was /etc/crontab which is the standard cronjobs file that is setting the { daily , monthly , weekly crons } 

 

 debian:~# ls -ld /etc/cron.*
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 фев 27 10:54 /etc/cron.d/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 фев 27 10:55 /etc/cron.daily/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 дек  7 23:04 /etc/cron.hourly/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 дек  7 23:04 /etc/cron.monthly/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 дек  7 23:04 /etc/cron.weekly/

 

debian:~# cat /etc/crontab 
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file
# and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
# that none of the other crontabs do.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin# Example of job definition:
# .—————- minute (0 – 59)
# |  .————- hour (0 – 23)
# |  |  .———- day of month (1 – 31)
# |  |  |  .——- month (1 – 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr …
# |  |  |  |  .—- day of week (0 – 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
# |  |  |  |  |
# *  *  *  *  * user-name command to be executed
17 *    * * *    root    cd / && run-parts –report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6    * * *    root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts –report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6    * * 7    root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts –report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6    1 * *    root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts –report /etc/cron.monthly )

What above does is:

– Run cron.hourly once at every hour at 1:17 am
– Run cron.daily once at every day at 6:25 am.
– Run cron.weekly once at every day at 6:47 am.
– Run cron.monthly once at every day at 6:42 am.

As you can see if anacron is present on the system it is run via it otherwise it is run via run-parts binary command which is reading and executing one by one all scripts insude /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.weekly , /etc/cron.mothly

anacron – few more words

Anacron is the canonical way to run at least the jobs from /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly) after startup, even when their execution was missed because the system was not running at the given time. Anacron does not handle any cron jobs from /etc/cron.d, so any package that wants its /etc/cron.d cronjob being executed by anacron needs to take special measures.

If anacron is installed, regular processing of the /etc/cron.d{daily,weekly,monthly} is omitted by code in /etc/crontab but handled by anacron via /etc/anacrontab. Anacron's execution of these job lists has changed multiple times in the past:

debian:~# cat /etc/anacrontab 
# /etc/anacrontab: configuration file for anacron

# See anacron(8) and anacrontab(5) for details.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
HOME=/root
LOGNAME=root

# These replace cron's entries
1    5    cron.daily    run-parts –report /etc/cron.daily
7    10    cron.weekly    run-parts –report /etc/cron.weekly
@monthly    15    cron.monthly    run-parts –report /etc/cron.monthly

In wheezy and earlier, anacron is executed via init script on startup and via /etc/cron.d at 07:30. This causes the jobs to be run in order, if scheduled, beginning at 07:35. If the system is rebooted between midnight and 07:35, the jobs run after five minutes of uptime.
In stretch, anacron is executed via a systemd timer every hour, including the night hours. This causes the jobs to be run in order, if scheduled, beween midnight and 01:00, which is a significant change to the previous behavior.
In buster, anacron is executed via a systemd timer every hour with the exception of midnight to 07:00 where anacron is not invoked. This brings back a bit of the old timing, with the jobs to be run in order, if scheduled, beween 07:00 and 08:00. Since anacron is also invoked once at system startup, a reboot between midnight and 08:00 also causes the jobs to be scheduled after five minutes of uptime.
anacron also didn't have an upstream release in nearly two decades and is also currently orphaned in Debian.

As of 2019-07 (right after buster's release) it is planned to have cron and anacron replaced by cronie.

cronie – Cronie was forked by Red Hat from ISC Cron 4.1 in 2007, is the default cron implementation in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux at least since Version 6. cronie seems to have an acive upstream, but is currently missing some of the things that Debian has added to vixie cron over the years. With the finishing of cron's conversion to quilt (3.0), effort can begin to add the Debian extensions to Vixie cron to cronie.

Because cronie doesn't have all the Debian extensions yet, it is not yet suitable as a cron replacement, so it is not in Debian.
 

5. systemd-timers – The new crazy systemd stuff for script system job scheduling


Timers are systemd unit files with a suffix of .timer. systemd-timers was introduced with systemd so older Linux OS-es does not have it.
 Timers are like other unit configuration files and are loaded from the same paths but include a [Timer] section which defines when and how the timer activates. Timers are defined as one of two types:

 

  • Realtime timers (a.k.a. wallclock timers) activate on a calendar event, the same way that cronjobs do. The option OnCalendar= is used to define them.
  • Monotonic timers activate after a time span relative to a varying starting point. They stop if the computer is temporarily suspended or shut down. There are number of different monotonic timers but all have the form: OnTypeSec=. Common monotonic timers include OnBootSec and OnActiveSec.

     

     

    For each .timer file, a matching .service file exists (e.g. foo.timer and foo.service). The .timer file activates and controls the .service file. The .service does not require an [Install] section as it is the timer units that are enabled. If necessary, it is possible to control a differently-named unit using the Unit= option in the timer’s [Timer] section.

    systemd-timers is a complex stuff and I'll not get into much details but the idea was to give awareness of its existence for more info check its manual man systemd.timer

Its most basic use is to list all configured systemd.timers, below is from my home Debian laptop
 

debian:~# systemctl list-timers –all
NEXT                         LEFT         LAST                         PASSED       UNIT                         ACTIVATES
Tue 2020-03-24 23:33:58 EET  18s left     Tue 2020-03-24 23:31:28 EET  2min 11s ago laptop-mode.timer            lmt-poll.service
Tue 2020-03-24 23:39:00 EET  5min left    Tue 2020-03-24 23:09:01 EET  24min ago    phpsessionclean.timer        phpsessionclean.service
Wed 2020-03-25 00:00:00 EET  26min left   Tue 2020-03-24 00:00:01 EET  23h ago      logrotate.timer              logrotate.service
Wed 2020-03-25 00:00:00 EET  26min left   Tue 2020-03-24 00:00:01 EET  23h ago      man-db.timer                 man-db.service
Wed 2020-03-25 02:38:42 EET  3h 5min left Tue 2020-03-24 13:02:01 EET  10h ago      apt-daily.timer              apt-daily.service
Wed 2020-03-25 06:13:02 EET  6h left      Tue 2020-03-24 08:48:20 EET  14h ago      apt-daily-upgrade.timer      apt-daily-upgrade.service
Wed 2020-03-25 07:31:57 EET  7h left      Tue 2020-03-24 23:30:28 EET  3min 11s ago anacron.timer                anacron.service
Wed 2020-03-25 17:56:01 EET  18h left     Tue 2020-03-24 17:56:01 EET  5h 37min ago systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service

 

8 timers listed.


N ! B! If a timer gets out of sync, it may help to delete its stamp-* file in /var/lib/systemd/timers (or ~/.local/share/systemd/ in case of user timers). These are zero length files which mark the last time each timer was run. If deleted, they will be reconstructed on the next start of their timer.

Summary

In this article, I've shortly explain logic behind debugging weird restart events etc. of Linux configured services such as Apache due to configured scripts set to run with a predefined scheduled job timing. I shortly explained on how to figure out why the preset default install configured cron jobs such as logrorate – the service that is doing system logs archiving and nulling run at a certain time. I shortly explained the mechanism behind cron.{daily, monthy, weekly} and its execution via anacron – runner program similar to crond that never misses to run a scheduled job even if a system downtime occurs due to a crashed Docker container etc. run-parts command's use was shortly explained. A short look at systemd.timers was made which is now essential part of almost every new Linux release and often used by system scripts for scheduling time based maintainance tasks.

Great Lent third Sunday of the Veneration of the Holy Christ Cross

Monday, March 23rd, 2020

http://bg-patriarshia.bg/img/ftp/Krustopoklonna.
Today is the third Sunday of the Holy Christ Cross Holy Feast (Кръстовден / The day of the Cross).
Each of the Great Lent time period has its own Sunday dedicated to very important events or saints.
This one has been set over the centuries by the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church to accent the Great unbeatable power of the Holy Cross. Which is the greatest power through which each of us Christians is victorious over sin, flesh, passions, temptations and everything visible and invisible.
The cross provides every person and us as socieity with 'The power of God and Wisdowm of God' to those who venerate it for those being saved as pointed in Holy Bible in scriptures (1 Corintians 1:24).
This Sunday was set to help people recharge their spiritual powers in feat of Lentin hardship weakness and temptations. It is to remind the faithful Christians of the redemption received through Christ's sufferings for our sins. But besides the joy of the Cross it is to remind us another important fact – "He who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me" (Mt 10:38).

The hymnology (the Church songs) accent over the Holy Liturgy morning service is the victory and joy of the cross, not the suffering. The Church fathers equate the life-giving cross with the tree of life and plant it in the middle of the Lenten pilgrimage. It was the tree that was planted in Paradise; it is to remind the faithful of both Adam's bliss and how he was deprived from it.

The Church teaches that it is Christ's cross that saves. One cannot take up his own cross and follow Christ unless one has Christ's cross which he took up to save mankind. Partaking of this tree, one will no longer die, but will be kept alive.

 

History of the Veneration of Holy Cross
 

The commemoration and ceremonies of the Third Sunday of Lent are closely parallel to the feasts of the Veneration of the Cross (September 14) and the Procession of the Cross (August 1). Not only does the Sunday of the Holy Cross prepare us for commemoration of the Crucifixion, but it also reminds us that the whole of Lent is a period when we are crucified with Christ.

As we have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24), and will have mortified ourselves during these forty days of the Fast, the precious and life-giving Cross is now placed before us to refresh our souls and encourage us who may be filled with a sense of bitterness, resentment, and depression. The Cross reminds us of the Passion of our Lord, and by presenting to us His example, it encourages us to follow Him in struggle and sacrifice, being refreshed, assured, and comforted. In other words, we must experience what the Lord experienced during His Passion – being humiliated in a shameful manner. The Cross teaches us that through pain and suffering we shall see the fulfillment of our hopes: the heavenly inheritance and eternal glory.

As they who walk on a long and hard way and are bowed down by fatigue find great relief and strengthening under the cool shade of a leafy tree, so do we find comfort, refreshment, and rejuvenation under the Life-giving Cross, which our Fathers “planted” on this Sunday. Thus, we are fortified and enabled to continue our Lenten journey with a light step, rested and encouraged.

Elevation-of-the-Holy-Cross-feast

Hymns

As at the feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross on September 14, the Trisagion is replaced by the hymn:

Before Thy Cross we bow down in worship, O Master, and Thy holy Resurrection we glorify. (Thrice)
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
And Thy holy Resurrection we glorify.
Before Thy Cross we bow down in worship, O Master, and Thy holy Resurrection we glorify.

Тропар Църковнославянски (Българска Православна Църква) / Troparion Old Bulgarian (Church Slavonic) Bulgarian Orthodox Church

Спаси, Господи, люди Твоя и благослови достояние Твое, победи православному болгарскому народу на сопротивния даруя, и Твое сохраняя Крестом Твоим жительство.

Troparion (Tone 4) [1]

O Lord, save Your people,
And bless Your inheritance.
Grant victories to the Orthodox Christians,
over their adversaries.
And by virtue of Your Cross
Preserve Your habitation!
Kontakion (Tone 7) [2]

Now the flaming sword no longer guards the gates of Eden;
It has mysteriously been quenched by the wood of the Cross!
The sting of death and the victory of hell have been vanquished;
For You, O my Savior, have come and cried to those in hell:
"Enter again into paradise."

Elevation-of-the-Holy-Cross-of-Christ

It is worthy to remind my dear readers for the Cross, because nowadays everyone is scared from the Coronavirus COVID-19 mysterious virus who is plaguing the death and who makes people who have no faith to tremble besides a simple flu, but do not tremble in front of the Cross of Christ and the near coming Great Judgement day in which each of us will have to give account for his good and bad deeds …
Also through the centuries the Cross has been a reason for many miracles. In this scareful days where constitutions of many countries has been breached and a military regimes are pushed into our countres.

Lets pray and bow the holy cross of Christ to protect our lands, Countries families and loved grand parents, mothers, fathers, children, friends and every living creature from the evil that is lurking the earth!

 

Check if server is Physical Bare Metal or a Virtual Machine and its type

Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

check-if-linux-operating-system-is-running-on-physical-bare-metal-or-virtual-machine

In modern times the IT employee system administrator / system engineer / security engineer or a developer who has to develop and test code remotely on UNIX hosts, we have to login to multiple of different servers located in separate data centers around the world situated in Hybrid Operating system environments running multitude of different Linux OSes. Often especially for us sysadmins it is important to know whether the remote machine we have SSHed to is physical server (Bare Metal) or a virtual machines running on top of different kind of Hypervisor node OpenXen / Virtualbox / Virtuosso  / VMWare etc.
 

Then the question comes how to determine whether A remote Installed Linux is Physical or Virtual ?
 

1. Using the dmesg kernel log utility


The good old dmesg that is used to examine and control the kernel ring buffer detects plenty of useful information which gives you the info whether a server is Virtual or Bare Metal. It is present and accessible on every Linux server out there, thus using it is the best and simplest way to determine the OS system node type.

To grep whether a machine is Virtual and the Hypervisor type use:

 

nginx:~# dmesg | grep "Hypervisor detected"
[0.000000] Hypervisor detected: KVM


As you see above OS installed is using the KVM Virtualization technology.

An empty output of this command means the Remote OS is installed on a physical computer.

 

2. Detecting the OS platform the systemd way


Systemd along with the multiple over-complication of things that nearly all sysadmins (including me hate) so much introduced something useful in the fact of hostnamectl command
that could give you the info about the OS chassis platform.

 

root@pcfreak:~# hostnamectl status
 
 Static hostname: pcfreak
         Icon name: computer-desktop
           Chassis: desktop
        Machine ID: 02425d67037b8e67cd98bd2800002671
           Boot ID: 34a83b9a79c346168082f7605c2f557c
  Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)
            Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64
      Architecture: x86-64

 

 

Below is output of a VM running on a Oracle Virtualbox HV.

 

linux:~# hostnamectl status
Static hostname: ubuntuserver
 Icon name: computer-vm
 Chassis: vm
 Machine ID: 2befe86cf8887ca098f509e457554beb
 Boot ID: 8021c02d65dc46b1885afb25fddcf18c
 Virtualization: oracle
 Operating System: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
 Kernel: Linux 4.4.0-78-generic
 Architecture: x86-64

 

3. Detect concrete container virtualization with systemd-detect-virt 


Another Bare Metal or VM identify tool that was introducted some time ago by freedesktop project is systemd-detect-virt (usually command is part of systemd package).
It is useful to detect the exact virtualization on a systemd running OS systemd-detect-virt is capable to detect many type of Virtualization type that are rare like: IBM zvm S390 Z/VM, bochs, bhyve (a FreeBSD hypervisor), Mac OS's parallels, lxc (linux containers), docker containers, podman etc.

The output from the command is either none (if no virtualization is present or the VM Hypervisor Host type):

 

server:~# systemd-detect-virt
none

 

quake:~# systemd-detect-virt
oracle

 

4. Install and use facter to report per node facts

 

debian:~# apt-cache show facter|grep -i desc -A2
Description-en: collect and display facts about the system
 Facter is Puppet’s cross-platform system profiling library. It discovers and
 reports per-node facts, which are collected by the Puppet agent and are made

Description-md5: 88cdf9a1db3df211de4539a0570abd0a
Homepage: https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter
Tag: devel::lang:ruby, devel::library, implemented-in::ruby,
root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# apt-cache show facter|grep -i desc -A1
Description-en: collect and display facts about the system
 Facter is Puppet’s cross-platform system profiling library. It discovers and

Description-md5: 88cdf9a1db3df211de4539a0570abd0a
Homepage: https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter

 


– Install facter on Debian / Ubuntu / deb based Linux

 

# apt install facter –yes


– Install facter on RedHat / CentOS RPM based distros

# yum install epel-release

 

# yum install facter


– Install facter on OpenSuSE / SLES

# zypper install facter


Once installed on the system to find out whether the remote Operating System is Virtual:

# facter 2> /dev/null | grep virtual
is_virtual => false
virtual => physical


If the machine is a virtual machine you will get some different output like:

# facter 2> /dev/null | grep virtual
is_virtual => true
virtual => kvm


If you're lazy to grep you can use it with argument.

# facter virtual
physical

 

6. Use lshw and dmidecode (list hardware configuration tool)


If you don't have the permissions to install facter on the system and you can see whether lshw (list hardware command) is not already present on remote host.

# lshw -class system  
storage-host                  
    description: Computer
    width: 64 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.7 vsyscall32

If the system is virtual you'll get an output similar to:

# lshw -class system  
debianserver 
 description: Computer
 product: VirtualBox
 vendor: innotek GmbH
 version: 1.2
 serial: 0
 width: 64 bits
 capabilities: smbios-2.5 dmi-2.5 vsyscall32
 configuration: family=Virtual Machine uuid=78B58916-4074-42E2-860F-7CAF39F5E6F5


Of course as it provides a verbosity of info on Memory / CPU type / Caches / Cores / Motherboard etc. virtualization used or not can be determined also with dmidecode / hwinfo and other tools that detect the system hardware this is described thoroughfully in my  previous article Get hardware system info on Linux.


7. Detect virtualziation using virt-what or imvirt scripts


imvirt is a little script to determine several virtualization it is pretty similar to virt-what the RedHat own script for platform identification. Even though virt-what is developed for RHEL it is available on other distros, Fedoda, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux (AUR) just like is imvirt.

installing both of them is with the usual apt-get / yum or on Arch Linux with yay package manager (yay -S virt-what) …

Once run the output it produces for physical Dell / HPE / Fujitsu-Siemens Bare Metal servers would be just empty string.

# virt-what
#

Or if the system is Virtual Machine, you'll get the type, for example KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) / virtualbox / qemu etc.

#imvirt
Physical

 

Conclusion


It was explained how to do a simple check whether the server works on a physical hardware or on a virtual Host hypervisor. The most basic and classic way is with dmesg. If no access to dmesg is due to restrictions you can try the other methods for systemd enabled OSes with hostnamectl / systemd-detect-virt. Other means if the tools are installed or you have the permissions to install them is with facter / lshw or with virt-what / imvirt scripts.
There definitely perhaps much more other useful tools to grasp hardware and virtualization information but this basics could be useful enough for shell scripting purposes.
If you know other tools, please share.
 

Linux: Compress website images for better responsiveness with Trimage Graphical tool

Tuesday, March 10th, 2020

trimage-compress-reduce-lossless-encoding-of-pictures-for-seo-linux-screenshot0

If you run a Website or a Blog with images sooner or later you will end up with in looking for better ways to optimize the SEO of the website. I had a small discussion today with a friend of mine Mitko Ivanov who is working as SEO consultant expert,  we had a small discussion on the good practice of optimizing website pictures to reduce the website opening time. Ingeral part of Website responsiveness is the time the Browser needs to fetch all the page Images. Thus if your site is with multiple images, like this blog here, picture comperssion is definitely something that could make miracles in how website visualize for end user and increase rank in Search Engines. The easiest way to compress images of an amateur website of course is to use external picture compression service such as tinypng.com, this requires no knowledge at any computer technology and you can do it easy, but the problem is it shares your image to the remote website used for conversion and I personally think this is not the best idea.
For WordPress website owners of course there is plenty of plugins such as eWWW Image Optimizer that does realtime reduce of size of picture by chunking out the unnecessery bits.
Alternative to especially for people who have a little bit of technical knowledge is is to use some command line tool as optipng together with some kind of shell for loopfor details see my previous article Optimize PNG images by compressing on GNU / Linux, FreeBSD server to Improve Website overall Performance.
But for Many of Webmaster site owners this solution takes too much time as well many people just don't have even basic command line knowledge / are kinda of scared from the console but need to do image compression in a simple GUI way for those the good news are there is  Graphical cross-platform tool for losslessly optimizing PNG and JPG files for web. Trimage.
To use it it even unexperienced non enthusiast could simply roll out a new Virtual Machine on top of some VM Host machine such as Virtual Box and roll out some kind of Linux distribution via a graphical installer which is mega easy well guided and takes 15-20 minutes time.

Once machine is set-up either the Graphical Distribution tool for page management or via apt you can fetch Trimage. It is now existing in most Linux distributions so, to install it on any deb based distribution Debian / Mint / Ubuntu etc. do the usual:

# apt-get install –yes trimage


trimage-compress-reduce-lossless-encoding-of-pictures-for-seo-linux-screenshot1

Once you have it, just move the pictures you want to compress for losslessly optimizing from your website to your Computer with Linux. Trimage GUI on the background will run commands optipng, pngcrush, advpng or jpegoptim, imageoptim and depending on the filetype remove the unnecessery file data that are appended by the program with which image was produced Gimp / Photoshop / Camera software etc. All image files are losslessy compressed on the highest available compression levels, and EXIF and other metadata is removed so you just have to recopy ( upload ) the optimized images back to the website.

trimage-compress-reduce-lossless-encoding-of-pictures-for-seo-linux-screenshot2

That's all folks Enjoy ! 🙂

 

IBM TSM dsmc console client use for listing configured backups, checking set scheduled backups and backup and restore operations howto

Friday, March 6th, 2020

tsm-ibm-logo_tivoli-dsmc-console-client-listing-backups-create-backups-and-restore-on-linux-unix-windows

Creating a simple home based backup solution with some shell scripting and rsync is a common use. However as a sysadmin in a middle sized or large corporations most companies use some professional backup service such as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager TSM – recently IBM changed the name of the product to IBM Spectrum.

IBM TSM  is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery that is used for Privare Clouds backup and other high end solutions where data criticality is top.
Usually in large companies TSM backup handling is managed by a separate team or teams as managing a large TSM infrastructure is quite a complex task, however my experience as a sysadmin show me that even if you don't have too much of indepth into tsm it is very useful to know how to manage at least basic Incremental backup operations such as view what is set to be backupped, set-up a new directory structure for backup, check the backup schedule configured, check what files are included and which excluded from the backup store etc. 

TSM has multi OS support ans you can use it on most streamline Operating systems Windows / Mac OS X and Linux in this specific article I'll be talking concretely about backing up data with tsm on Linux, tivoli can be theoretically brought up even on FreeBSD machines via the Linuxemu BSD module and the 64-Bit Tivoli Storage Manager RPMs.
Therefore in this small article I'll try to give few useful operations for the novice admin that stumbles on tsm backupped server that needs some small maintenance.
 

1. Starting up the dsmc command line client

 

Nomatter the operating system on which you run it to run the client run:

# dsmc

 

tsm-check-backup-schedule-set-time

Note that usually dsmc should run as superuser so if you try to run it via a normal non-root user you will get an error message like:

 

[ user@linux ~]$ dsmc
ANS1398E Initialization functions cannot open one of the Tivoli Storage Manager logs or a related file: /var/tsm/dsmerror.log. errno = 13, Permission denied

 

Tivoli SM has an extensive help so to get the use basics, type help
 

tsm> help
1.0 New for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Version 6.4
2.0 Using commands
  2.1 Start and end a client command session
    2.1.1 Process commands in batch mode
    2.1.2 Process commands in interactive mode
  2.2 Enter client command names, options, and parameters
    2.2.1 Command name
    2.2.2 Options
    2.2.3 Parameters
    2.2.4 File specification syntax
  2.3 Wildcard characters
  2.4 Client commands reference
  2.5 Archive
  2.6 Archive FastBack

Enter 'q' to exit help, 't' to display the table of contents,
press enter or 'd' to scroll down, 'u' to scroll up or
enter a help topic section number, message number, option name,
command name, or command and subcommand:    

 

2. Listing files listed for backups

 

A note to make here is as in most corporate products tsm supports command aliases so any command supported described in the help like query, could be
abbreviated with its first letters only, e.g. query filespace tsm cmd can be abbreviated as

tsm> q fi

Commands can be run non-interactive mode also so if you want the output of q fi you can straight use:

tsm> dsmc q fi

 

tsm-check-included-excluded-files-q-file-if-backupped-list-backup-set-directories

This shows the directories and files that are set for backup creation with Tivoli.

 

3. Getting included and excluded backup set files

 

It is useful to know what are the exact excluded files from tsm set backup this is done with query inclexcl

tsm-check-excluded-included-files

 

4. Querying for backup schedule time

Tivoli as every other backup solution is creating its set to backup files in a certain time slot periods. 
To find out what is the time slot for backup creation use;

tsm> q sched
Schedule Name: WEEKLY_ITSERV
      Description: ITSERV weekly incremental backup
   Schedule Style: Classic
           Action: Incremental
          Options: 
          Objects: 
         Priority: 5
   Next Execution: 180 Hours and 35 Minutes
         Duration: 15 Minutes
           Period: 1 Week  
      Day of Week: Wednesday
            Month:
     Day of Month:
    Week of Month:
           Expire: Never  

 

tsm-query-partitions-backupeed-or-not

 

5. Check which files have been backed up

If you want to make sure backups are really created it is a good to check, which files from the selected backup files have already
a working backup copy.

This is done with query backup like so:

tsm> q ba /home/*

 

tsm-dsmc-query-user-home-for-backups

If you want to query all the current files and directories backed up under a directory and all its subdirectories you need to add the -subdir=yes option as below:

 

tsm> q ba /home/hipo/projects/* -subdir=yes
   
Size      Backup Date        Mgmt Class A/I File
   —-      ———–        ———- — —-
    512  12-09-2011 19:57:09    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hfs0106
  1,024  08-12-2011 02:46:53    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hsm41perf
    512  12-09-2011 19:57:09    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hsm41test
    512  24-04-2012 00:22:56    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hsm42upg
  1,024  12-09-2011 19:57:09    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hfs0106/test
  1,024  12-09-2011 19:57:09    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hfs0106/test/test2
 12,048  04-12-2011 02:01:29    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hsm41perf/tables
 50,326  30-04-2012 01:35:26    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hsm42upg/PMR70023
 50,326  27-04-2012 00:28:15    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hsm42upg/PMR70099
 11,013  24-04-2012 00:22:56    STANDARD    A  /home/hipo/projects/hsm42upg/md5check  

 

  • To make tsm, backup some directories on Linux / AIX other unices:

 

tsm> incr /  /usr  /usr/local  /home /lib

 

  • For tsm to backup some standard netware drives, use:

 

tsm> incr NDS:  USR:  SYS:  APPS:  

 

  • To backup C:\ D:\ E:\ F:\ if TSM is running on Windows

 

tsm> incr C:  D:  E: F:  -incrbydate 

 

  • To back up entire disk volumes irrespective of whether files have changed since the last backup, use the selective command with a wildcard and -subdir=yes as below:

 

tsm> sel /*  /usr/*   /home/*  -su=yes   ** Unix/Linux

 

7. Backup selected files from a backup location

 

It is intuitive to think you can just add some wildcard characters to select what you want
to backup from a selected location but this is not so, if you try something like below
you will get an err.

 

tsm> incr /home/hipo/projects/*/* -su=yes      
ANS1071E Invalid domain name entered: '/home/hipo/projects/*/*'


The proper way to select a certain folder / file for backup is with:

 

tsm> sel /home/hipo/projects/*/* -su=yes

 

8. Restoring tsm data from backup

 

To restore the config httpd.conf to custom directory use:

 

tsm> rest /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf  /home/hipo/restore/

 

N!B! that in order for above to work you need to have the '/' trailing slash at the end.

If you want to restore a file under a different name:

 

tsm> rest /etc/ntpd.conf  /home/hipo/restore/

 

9. Restoring a whole backupped partition

 

tsm> rest /home/*  /tmp/restore/ -su=yes

 

This is using the Tivoli 'Restoring multiple files and directories', and the files to restore '*'
are kept till the one that was recovered (saying this in case if you accidently cancel the restore)

 

10. Restoring files with back date 

 

By default the restore function will restore the latest available backupped file, if you need
to recover a specific file, you need the '-inactive' '-pick' options.
The 'pick' interface is interactive so once listed you can select the exact file from the date
you want to restore.

General restore command syntax is:
 

tsm> restore [source-file] [destination-file]

 


tsm> rest /home/hipo/projects/*  /tmp/restore/ -su=yes  -inactive -pick

TSM Scrollable PICK Window – Restore

     #    Backup Date/Time        File Size A/I  File
   ————————————————————————————————–
   170. | 12-09-2011 19:57:09        650  B  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm41test/inclexcl.test
   171. | 12-09-2011 19:57:09       2.74 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm41test/inittab.ORIG
   172. | 12-09-2011 19:57:09       2.74 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm41test/inittab.TEST
   173. | 12-09-2011 19:57:09       1.13 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm41test/md5.out
   174. | 30-04-2012 01:35:26        512  B  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/PMR70023
   175. | 26-04-2012 01:02:08        512  B  I   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/PMR70023
   176. | 27-04-2012 00:28:15        512  B  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/PMR70099
   177. | 24-04-2012 19:17:34        512  B  I   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/PMR70099
   178. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       1.35 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/dsm.opt
   179. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       4.17 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/dsm.sys
   180. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       1.13 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/dsmmigfstab
   181. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       7.30 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/filesystems
   182. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       1.25 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/inclexcl
   183. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56        198  B  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/inclexcl.dce
   184. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56        291  B  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/inclexcl.ox_sys
   185. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56        650  B  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/inclexcl.test
   186. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56        670  B  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/inetd.conf
   187. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       2.71 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/inittab
   188. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       1.00 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/md5check
   189. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56      79.23 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/mkreport.020423.out
   190. | 24-04-2012 00:22:56       4.27 KB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/ssamap.020423.out
   191. | 26-04-2012 01:02:08      12.78 MB  A   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/PMR70023/70023.tar
   192. | 25-04-2012 16:33:36      12.78 MB  I   /home/hipo/projects/hsm42125upg/PMR70023/70023.tar
        0———10——–20——–30——–40——–50——–60——–70——–80——–90–
<U>=Up  <D>=Down  <T>=Top  <B>=Bottom  <R#>=Right  <L#>=Left
<G#>=Goto Line #  <#>=Toggle Entry  <+>=Select All  <->=Deselect All
<#:#+>=Select A Range <#:#->=Deselect A Range  <O>=Ok  <C>=Cancel
pick> 


To navigate in pick interface you can select individual files to restore via the number seen leftside.
To scroll up / down use 'U' and 'D' as described in the legenda.

 

11. Restoring your data to another machine

 

In certain circumstances, it may be necessary to restore some, or all, of your data onto a machine other than the original from which it was backed up.

In ideal case the machine platform should be identical to that of the original machine. Where this is not possible or practical please note that restores are only possible for partition types that the operating system supports. Thus a restore of an NTFS partition to a Windows 9x machine with just FAT support may succeed but the file permissions will be lost.
TSM does not work fine with cross-platform backup / restore, so better do not try cross-platform restores.
 Trying to restore files onto a Windows machine that have previously been backed up with a non-Windows one. TSM created backups on Windows sent by other OS platforms can cause  backups to become inaccessible from the host system.

To restore your data to another machine you will need the TSM software installed on the target machine. Entries in Tivoli configuration files dsm.sys and/or dsm.opt need to be edited if the node that you are restoring from does not reside on the same server. Please see our help page section on TSM configuration files for their locations for your operating system. 

To access files from another machine you should then start the TSM client as below:

 

# dsmc -virtualnodename=RESTORE.MACHINE      


You will then be prompted for the TSM password for this machine.

 

You will probably want to restore to a different destination to the original files to prevent overwriting files on the local machine, as below:

 

  • Restore of D:\ Drive to D:\Restore ** Windows 

 

tsm> rest D:\*   D:\RESTORE\    -su=yes 
 

 

  • Restore user /home/* to /scratch on ** Mac, Unix/Linux

 

tsm> rest /home/* /scratch/     -su=yes  
 

 

  • Restoring Tivoli data on old netware

 

tsm> rest SOURCE-SERVER\USR:*  USR:restore/   -su=yes  ** Netware

 

12. Adding more directories for incremental backup / Check whether TSM backup was done correctly?

The easiest way is to check the produced dschmed.log if everything is okay there should be records in the log that Tivoli backup was scheduled in a some hours time
succesfully.
A normally produced backup scheduled in log should look something like:

 

14-03-2020 23:03:04 — SCHEDULEREC STATUS BEGIN
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of objects inspected:   91,497
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of objects backed up:      113
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of objects updated:          0
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of objects rebound:          0
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of objects deleted:          0
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of objects expired:         53
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of objects failed:           6
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Total number of bytes transferred:    19.38 MB
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Data transfer time:                    1.54 sec
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Network data transfer rate:        12,821.52 KB/sec
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Aggregate data transfer rate:        114.39 KB/sec
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Objects compressed by:                    0%
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Elapsed processing time:           00:02:53
14-03-2020 23:03:04 — SCHEDULEREC STATUS END
14-03-2020 23:03:04 — SCHEDULEREC OBJECT END WEEKLY_23_00 14-12-2010 23:00:00
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Scheduled event 'WEEKLY_23_00' completed successfully.
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Sending results for scheduled event 'WEEKLY_23_00'.
14-03-2020 23:03:04 Results sent to server for scheduled event 'WEEKLY_23_00'.

 

in case of errors you should check dsmerror.log
 

Conclusion


In this article I've briefly evaluated some basics of IBM Commercial Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) to be able to  list backups, check backup schedules and how to the files set to be
excluded from a backup location and most importantly how to check that data backed up data is in a good shape and accessible.
It was explained how backups can be restored on a local and remote machine as well as how to  append new files to be set for backup on next incremental scheduled backup.
It was shown how the pick interactive cli interface could be used to restore files at a certain data back in time as well as how full partitions can be restored and how some
certain file could be retrieved from the TSM data copy.