Percival Daemons (Services) and Commands
There are several daemons that are required for Percival normal operation.
The daemons are responsible for data collection, detection of not
responding IPs, report generation, web user interface and managing
Percival configuration by remote client applications such as Merlin.
Every daemon except the webserver must be managed by overlord.pl
command.
There are following Percival daemons:
- kollector
- does all data collection.
- thawne.pl
- detects not responding network devices.
- querymaker.pl
- generates all reports
- konfigd
- provides configuration API to the external clients
- httpd
- Apache webserver. Needed for Percival Web interface.
Apache is controlled with apachectl command. It is located
in /usr/local/avalon/bin. Apache must be managed as
user root.
- apachectl start
- starts apache
- apachectl stop
- stops apache.
Every other daemon is controlled with overlord.
Overlord was developed because amount of Percival daemons2 was increasing rapidly. It was clear that some master daemon is needed
to rule them all. You need to know following basic overlord commands:
- overlord.pl ping
- tells status of each configured daemon
- overlord.pl check
- tells status of each configured daemon.
Restart the daemon if it is not running
- overlord.pl list
- lists options for each configured daemon
- overlord.pl tail <name>
- shows last lines of the daemon
log
- overlord.pl --help
- shows all available options and short
help
- overlord.pl modify <name> <param=value> ...
- tweaks
daemon options. If you installed from RPM system has very reasonable
default values. You should not change them unless you really know
what you are doing.
Every Percival process be it a command or daemon understand some common
options. These are:
- --help
- show help message and exit
- --version
- show version information and exit
- --loglevel <level>
- controls process output. Level can
be either Debug, Info, Warn or Error. Default level is Info. Debug
is the most verbose and must not be used in production.
- --logfile <file>
- controls where to send process output.
By default all output goes to STDOUT
Following options are accepted by any process but the process may
ignore them. After all it makes no sense to run device configurator
command (konfne) as daemon.
- --daemon
- if specified process becomes a daemon(service)
- --interval <seconds>
- controls how often daemon should
work. For example kollector is run every 120s
Next options are available in Lancelot only. In Percival they will
generate an error message.
- --cached
- turns on Perl based in memory cache. The cache
is optimized to be very memory friendly and produces nice speed up.
The option is obsoleted.
- --hdb
- turns on alternative implementation of the configuration
database (HDB). HDB database is optimized for speed and provides order
of magnitude (and in some cases even more) speedup in comparison with
Percival implementation. It is also fully backward compatible
with the old database on the API level.
Percival only has four commands and you already know everything you
need about overlord. It leaves three others. One, target.pl,
is used for debugging of the configuration database and out of the
scope of this chapter. The other, konfne 3, is how you add, update or remove network devices from Percival.
In upcoming chapters we will deal with it a lot. The last one, kompile,
produces binary database from Percival text based configuration database
and downloads device configuration files from device modules. You
need to issue this command every time you edit configuration database
by hand or if you suspect that Percival database is corrupted.