This section will provide some suggested maintenance tasks for your EASA Server. The main aim of these suggestions is to ensure the availability of the EASA Server for users’ needs. There are two main aspects to the EASA Server’s availability, and these are:

1. EASA is up and running reliably

Events that could pose a problem to the availability of the EASA Server are loss of power, hard disk failure, insufficient disk space, etc.

This section contains three suggestions to keep EASA running reliably.

1. Use an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with the EASA Server
2. Set up EASA to run as a service, so that EASA is not accidentally turned off when someone logs off the EASA Server. See Running EASA as a Service for details on how to do this.
3. Stop and restart the EASA service occasionally, e.g. twice a year, to clear the EASA message logs, thus preventing them from getting too large.

An important maintenance task is to perform regular file backups of the important EASA data. This can be to any file media, for instance tape, CD, or hard disk. The important folders containing data created by your organization that should be regularly backed up are: admin, applications and users under <EASAROOT>/webapps/easa.

Within EASA, there is a backup facility for writing this data to another hard disk drive location.

To access this backup facility, you select Backup under the System menu while in Administrator mode. On the Backup page, there are two types of backups available: 1) Immediate, and 2) Scheduled backups.

The first type of backup available on the Backup page is the Immediate Backup. You can use this backup when you want to make a copy of your EASA system data right now. To perform an Immediate Backup, please follow the instructions given below:

• Select your choice for the Type data you want copied. An explanation of the choices can be found in the table below.

• Type in the full path for the Backup Directory to which the data will be copied.

Tip: Instead of typing the Backup Directory path, you can copy and paste the path from the Address box of a Windows Explorer window that is pointing to the target directory.

• Click on the Backup Now button.

The data requested in Type will be copied to the specified Backup Directory at this time. To better understand the choices available in the Type choice list, please see the explanation provided in the table below.

The second type of backup available on the Backup page is the Scheduled Backup. With this type of backup, you can specify a single schedule for backing up your EASA system data. To specify your Scheduled Backup, please follow the instructions given below:

• Select your choice for the Frequency at which you want the regularly scheduled backup to take place.
  • If you select Never, then proceed to Step 4 below.
  • If you select Daily, then next select the hour of the day.
  • If you select Weekly, then next select the day of the week and the hour of the day.
• Select your choice for Type data you want copied. An explanation of the choices can be found in the table above.
• Type in the full path for the Backup Directory to which the data will be copied.

Tip: Instead of typing the Backup Directory path, you can copy and paste the path from the Address box of a Windows Explorer window that is pointing to the target directory.

• Click on the Update Settings button.

Your settings for the Scheduled Backup have now been saved.

The Backup page also provides messages on a couple of things to let you know the state of your data backup and storage:

1. Statistics on the most recently completed backup, and
2. The day and time of the next scheduled backup.

EASAPs that submit themselves to the EASA server create a folder for themselves to work in on the server side. If the files are not handled in any way, they can build up and eventually occupy a large portion of the drive space.

The option to enable automated cleanups is present in a property file located on the file system on the server in the EASA server data folder:

   /admin/config/System.properties

The following line is already present in the file::

   #easa.server.deleteoldsims.threshold.days=90

The option is disabled by default.

Stopping the EASA service, removing the hashtag (#) from the start of the line and restarting the EASA service will enable the feature. The number of days can be customized by replacing the pre-populated option of 90 before restarting the service.

When working with batch software that generate relatively large files as a result, the folder in the EASA folder structure that houses these results can grow out of proportion over time. If these historic results can be removed after a certain amount of time, EASA can be configured to do that automatically.

This option is disabled by default and enabling it involves editing a context.properties file on the EASA Servers file system. The path of the file is the following:

   <EASA SERVER DATA>\easa\admin\config\context.properties

Once opened with a text editor, find the following line

   #easa.server.deleteoldsims.threshold.days=30

and remove the hashtag (#) from the front. The value (30 above) will specify the amount of days a Result will be kept, any older Results will be deleted automatically. The other related parameter

   #easa.server.deleteoldsims.loop.wait.millis=

sets the time after which the EASA server rechecks if there are Results to be deleted. This is set to 1 hour by default.