FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

There is a related page of Common Installation Problems.

How to recover from a corrupted ODB

• Stop your front-ends, mlogger, mhttpd, etc.
• Remove the shared memory associated to ODB buffer. Find the shared memory segment by doing

ls -l /dev/shm

then remove the segment that will be something like /dev/shm/*_test_ODB_SHM

• Move the old ODB files. These will be in the location given by Exptab, e.g. ~/online

cd online
mv .ODB.SHM .ODB.SHM.BAD

• Restart ODB with larger size using odbedit e.g.

odbedit -s 100000000

• Reload the last saved ODB dump you have (see save and reload the ODB). These dumps are typically called something like 'online/history/*.xml'.

So from odbedit you do something like

odbedit> load history/run00071.xml

• Your ODB should now be fixed.

Note that sometimes it seems that you also need to remove the buffers associated with the system messages (called SYSMSG) as well as the buffers associated with the ODB.

Increasing Number of Hot-links

1. Use odbedit to save current ODB

   odbedit
   save current_odb.odb 
   

2. Stop all the running MIDAS processes, including mlogger and mserver using the web interface. Then stop mhttpd as well.
3. Remove your old ODB (we will recreate it after modifying MIDAS, using the backup you just made).

   mv .ODB.SHM .ODB.SHM.20161104
   rm /dev/shm/thomas_ODB_SHM
   

4. Make the following modifications to midas. In this particular case I have increased the max number of open records from 256 to 1024. You would need to change the constants if you want to change to other values

   diff --git a/include/midas.h b/include/midas.h
   index 02b30dd..33be7be 100644
   --- a/include/midas.h
   +++ b/include/midas.h
   @@ -254,7 +254,7 @@ typedef std::vector<std::string> STRING_LIST;
   -#define MAX_OPEN_RECORDS       256           /**< number of open DB records   */
   +#define MAX_OPEN_RECORDS       1024           /**< number of open DB records   */
   diff --git a/src/odb.c b/src/odb.c
   index 47ace8f..ac1bef3 100755
   --- a/src/odb.c
   +++ b/src/odb.c
   @@ -699,8 +699,8 @@ static void db_validate_sizes()
   -   assert(sizeof(DATABASE_CLIENT) == 2112);
   -   assert(sizeof(DATABASE_HEADER) == 135232);
   +   assert(sizeof(DATABASE_CLIENT) == 8256);
   +   assert(sizeof(DATABASE_HEADER) == 528448);
   

   The calculation is as follows (in case you want a different number of open records): DATABASE_CLIENT = 64 + 8*MAX_OPEN_ERCORDS = 64 + 8*1024 = 8256 DATABASE_HEADER = 64 + 64*DATABASE_CLIENT = 64 + 64*8256 = 528448

5. Rebuild MIDAS

   make clean; make
   

6. Create new ODB

   odbedit -s 1000000
   

   Note, you should change the size of the ODB to whatever you need.

7. reload your original ODB

   load  current_odb.odb
   

8. Rebuild your frontend against new MIDAS; then it should work and you should be able to produce more open records.