This section will provide some suggested maintenance tasks for an EASA Server. The main aim of these suggestions is to ensure the availability of the EASA Server for a User’s needs.

• The EASA Server must be up and running reliably
• The EASAPs, results and system configuration data are stored securely

Events that could pose a problem to the availability of an EASA Server include loss of power, hard disk failure, insufficient disk space, network outage, among many other faults.

This section contains three suggestions to keep EASA running reliably.

• Use an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with the EASA Server
• Set up EASA to run as a service, so that EASA is not accidentally turned off when a User logs off the EASA Server. See Running EASA as a Service for details on how to do this.

1. Stop and restart the EASA service occasionally, e.g. twice a year, to clear or rotate 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. Select:

• EASA→Set Mode→Administrator→System→Backup

On the Backup page, there are two types of backups available:

• Immediate
• Scheduled backups.

To perform an Immediate Backup, please follow the instructions given below:

• Select the Type of data to copy. An explanation of the choices can be found in the table below.

• Type in the full path for the Backup Directory for the copy.

• 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.

Configure regular periodic or Scheduled Backups below:

• Select a Frequency for a regularly scheduled backup.
  • If:
    • Daily→select the hour of the day.
    • Weekly→select the day of the week and the hour of the day.
• Select a choice for Type data to copy. 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.

• Click on the Update Settings button to save these settings.

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

By default this option is disabled.

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.