Access Anywhere Node Management

Every Access Anywhere installation contains one or more Access Anywhere nodes, with multi-node deployments used to increase processing capacity and/or to provide higher availability. Prior to version 2106 of Access Anywhere, there was no indication in Access Anywhere's UI of whether an installation was single node or multi node. Starting with version 2106 Access Anywhere web interface for the appliance administrator provides a Node Management page which is accessed from the appliance administrator's Settings menu. It includes a tab that lists the nodes that make up the installation and a tab that provides information about tasks that have been executed on each node.

The Nodes tab lists all of the nodes that are part of Access Anywhere installation. (These are Access Anywhere VMs that have the /var/www/smestorage/public_html directory).

Here are the meanings of the fields in this list:

• ID - An identifier generated by Access Anywhere for the node. It cannot be changed by Access Anywhere administrators or users. Its association with the node is not necessarily permanent.
• Title - The friendly name assigned to the node. Titles are assigned automatically but, as discussed later in these notes, they can be changed to more meaningful phrases.
• Unique ID - Another identifier generated by Access Anywhere for the node. It cannot be changed by Access Anywhere administrators or users. Its association with the node is permanent.
• Joined - The date on which the node was added to the list.
• Last Check-in - The most recent date on which the node confirmed that it was still part of Access Anywhere installation.

The Node Management page, like every Access Anywhere web page, is served to the browser by a Access Anywhere web node in response to a request by the browser. In a multi node installation there may be more than one web node, any one of which might serve the page in response to a particular request. Except under very unusual circumstances, each time the Node Management page is served the node that served it is labelled “Current node” on the node list.

Nodes add themselves by registering with Access Anywhere database. They cannot be added by Access Anywhere administrators or users.

When a node registers with the Access Anywhere database it is assigned a default name (title) consisting of the word “Node” followed by a space and the node's ID. Administrators can rename a node by clicking on the pencil icon to open a renaming dialog box.

To give the nodes on the list more meaningful names you need to determine which Access Anywhere VM is represented by which node on the nodes list. For example, suppose your Access Anywhere installation consists of three nodes: a web node and two database nodes that run in different parts of your data center. When they registered with Access Anywhere database they would be given default names like “Node 1”, “Node 2” and “Node 3”. You would might want to give them more descriptive names like “Web”, “East Hall DB” and “West Hall DB”. To figure out which node on the list corresponds to which VM, ask your Access Anywhere Linux administrator to ssh in to each of the VMs, inspect the contents of its:

/var/www/smestorage/public_html/.ff_node_id.txt 

file, and record the unique id from that file.

You can then match the unique id of each VM to the Unique ID one of the nodes on the list.

When a node is removed from the nodes list, the history of tasks that were run on that node (more on this later) is removed from the database. Although nodes add themselves to the list, they are never removed automatically. This prevents nodes that are briefly unavailable from being removed and their task history being lost. The appliance administrator can remove any node from the list except the node that is labelled “Current node” by clicking on the red 'X' next to the node entry on the list.

The Access Anywhere uses the information it has about the nodes that are part of the installation so that it can run operations on all nodes. It can do this in several ways, one of which is to create node management tasks. The Node Management page also includes a tab that lists operations that have been run this way and provides details about their execution.

Here are the meanings of the fields on the list:

• ID - A unique identifier assigned by Access Anywhere to the task.
• NodeID - Each task is launched on a particular node and then propagated to the other nodes. This is the identifier of the node on which the task was launched.
• Title - The Access Anywhere composes a title for each task based on the task type that is being performed. That title is shown here.
• Results - Each task is run on every node. The number in the Results field indicates on how many nodes the task has been completed.
• Type - This field shows the name of Access Anywhere operation that the task is performing. For example, “UnmountSmbFolder” is the task type for the operation to unmount an SMB directory.
• Created - The date on which the task was initiated.

These tasks are only visible for multi-node systems.

To see details of the execution of the task on each node, click on the Task Title. A window will open listing the nodes on which the task ran and the result on each node.

By clicking on the red 'X' next to a task on the list, the appliance administrator can remove from Access Anywhere database the records of the task having been executed.