6. Maintenance

This chapter should help you with the maintenance of the system, especially the dynamic data that is generated during the system operation.

Unfortunately, specific maintenance practices depend greatly on the way you deploy the system. However, there are some general guidelines in this chapter that you may find useful.

6.1. Maintained dynamic data

There are several types of data that are generated during the operation of the system:

  • the main database,

  • the logger database,

  • managed files,

  • syslog data.

Some of these data should be duplicated as a safety precaution or archived if a release of system resources is required.

Most of them can be packed by a compressing archiver and moved to a backup location (i.e. a backup server).

6.2. Databases

We recommend these standard PostgreSQL’s tools for database maintenance:

6.2.1. Simple backup: pg_dump

Textual backup of the whole database which you may want to perform daily using CRON. It also may come in handy in the case you need to migrate the data to a higher version of PostgreSQL.

Recommended for both FRED databases—main and logger—as a minimum crash-safety precaution.

See PostgreSQL’s documentation: SQL Dump.

6.2.1.1. Logger database content archivation

The logger database is divided into partitions by months which is embedded in its schema. This allows you to dump only the data from a specified month (usually the previous one).

6.2.2. Advanced backup: continuous archiving

Incremental binary backup that allows to recover the database to the most recent state at a minimum cost, since it backs up at a rate of minutes but it only records the difference from the previous backup.

Recommended for the main database as an advanced crash-safety precaution.

See PostgreSQL’s documentation: Continuous Archiving.

6.3. Managed files

You may archive and/or remove the older content of /var/lib/pyfred/* where the files managed by the FRED are located.

The system can handle missing files. When some part of the system requests a file, that has been removed, from the file manager, it reports an exception.

6.4. Syslog data

Local syslog files can be maintained by the logrotate utility which is a part of the operating system.

Syslog data on a remote log server can be maintained for example by the syslog-ng application, see the syslog-ng documentation

6.5. Upgrading

Important

Before you upgrade to a newer version, read the Release Notes and associated upgrade considerations carefully!

Considerations overview