21. Slony-I Administration Scripts

21.1. altperl Scripts

There is a set of scripts to simplify administeration of set of Slony-I instances. The scripts support having arbitrary numbers of nodes. They may be installed as part of the installation process:

./configure --with-perltools

This will produce a number of scripts with the prefix slonik_. They eliminate tedium by always referring to a central configuration file for the details of your site configuration. A documented sample of this file is provided in altperl/slon_tools.conf-sample. Most also include some command line help with the "--help" option, making them easier to learn and use.

Most generate Slonik scripts that are printed to STDOUT. At one time, the commands were passed directly to slonik for execution. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a pretty large calibre "foot gun", as minor typos on the command line led, on a couple of occasions, to pretty calamitous actions. The savvy administrator should review the script before piping it to slonik.

my %PARAMS =   (host=> undef,		# Host name
	   	dbname => 'template1',	# database name
		port => 5432,		# Port number
		user => 'postgres',	# user to connect as
		node => undef,		# node number
		password => undef,	# password for user
		parent => 1,		# which node is parent to this node
		noforward => undef	# shall this node be set up to forward results?
                sslmode => undef        # SSL mode argument - determine 
                                        # priority of SSL usage
                                        # = disable,allow,prefer,require
);

21.2. mkslonconf.sh

This is a shell script designed to rummage through a Slony-I cluster and generate a set of slon.conf files that slon accesses via the slon -f slon.conf option.

With all of the configuration residing in a configuration file for each slon, they can be invoked with minimal muss and fuss, with no risk of forgetting the -a option and thereby breaking a log shipping node.

Running it requires the following environment configuration:

• Firstly, the environment needs to be set up with suitable parameters for libpq to connect to one of the databases in the cluster. Thus, you need some suitable combination of the following environment variables set:

  • PGPORT

  • PGDATABASE

  • PGHOST

  • PGUSER

  • PGSERVICE

• SLONYCLUSTER - the name of the Slony-I cluster to be "rummaged".

• MKDESTINATION - a directory for configuration to reside in; the script will create MKDESTINATION/$SLONYCLUSTER/conf for the slon configuration files, and MKDESTINATION/$SLONYCLUSTER/pid for slon to store PID files in.

• LOGHOME - a directory for log files to reside in; a directory of the form $LOGHOME/$SLONYCLUSTER/node[number] will be created for each node.

For any "new" nodes that it discovers, this script will create a new slon conf file.

The file layout set up by mkslonconf.sh was specifically set up to allow managing slons across a multiplicity of clusters using the script in the following section...

21.3. start_slon.sh

This rc.d-style script was introduced in Slony-I version 2.0; it provides automatable ways of:

• Starting the slon, via start_slon.sh start

Attempts to start the slon, checking first to verify that it is not already running, that configuration exists, and that the log file location is writable. Failure cases include:

• No slon runtime configuration file exists,

• A slon is found with the PID indicated via the runtime configuration,

• The specified SLON_LOG location is not writable.

• Stopping the slon, via start_slon.sh stop

  This fails (doing nothing) if the PID (indicated via the runtime configuration file) does not exist;

• Monitoring the status of the slon, via start_slon.sh status

  This indicates whether or not the slon is running, and, if so, prints out the process ID.

The following environment variables are used to control slon configuration:

Note that these environment variables may either be set, in the script, or overridden by values passed in from the environment. The latter usage makes it easy to use this script in conjunction with the Section 25 so that it is regularly tested.

21.4. launch_clusters.sh

This is another shell script which uses the configuration as set up by mkslonconf.sh and is intended to support an approach to running Slony-I involving regularly (e.g. via a cron process) checking to ensure that slon processes are running.

It uses the following environment variables:

• PATH which needs to contain, preferably at the beginning, a path to the slon binaries that should be run.

• SLHOME indicates the "home" directory for slon configuration files; they are expected to be arranged in subdirectories, one for each cluster, with filenames of the form node1.conf, node2.conf, and such

  The script uses the command find $SLHOME/$cluster/conf -name "node[0-9]*.conf" to find slon configuration files.

  If you remove some of these files, or rename them so their names do not conform to the find command, they won't be found; that is an easy way to drop nodes out of this system.

• LOGHOME indicates the "home" directory for log storage.

  This script does not assume the use of the Apache log rotator to manage logs; in that PostgreSQL version 8 does its own log rotation, it seems undesirable to retain a dependancy on specific log rotation "technology."

• CLUSTERS is a list of Slony-I clusters under management.

In effect, you could run this every five minutes, and it would launch any missing slon processes.

21.5. slony1_extract_schema.sh

You may find that you wish to create a new node some time well after creating a cluster. The script slony1_extract_schema.sh will help you with this.

A command line might look like the following:

PGPORT=5881 PGHOST=master.int.example.info ./slony1_extract_schema.sh payroll payroll temppayroll

It performs the following:

• It dumps the origin node's schema, including the data in the Slony-I cluster schema.

  Note that the extra environment variables PGPORT and PGHOST to indicate additional information about where the database resides.

• This data is loaded into the freshly created temporary database, temppayroll

• The table and sequence OIDs in Slony-I tables are corrected to point to the temporary database's configuration.

• A slonik script is run to perform SLONIK UNINSTALL NODE on the temporary database. This eliminates all the special Slony-I tables, schema, and removes Slony-I triggers from replicated tables.

• Finally, pg_dump is run against the temporary database, delivering a copy of the cleaned up schema to standard output.

21.6. slony-cluster-analysis

If you are running a lot of replicated databases, where there are numerous Slony-I clusters, it can get painful to track and document this. The following tools may be of some assistance in this.

slony-cluster-analysis.sh is a shell script intended to provide some over-time analysis of the configuration of a Slony-I cluster. You pass in the usual libpq environment variables (PGHOST, PGPORT, PGDATABASE, and such) to connect to a member of a Slony-I cluster, and pass the name of the cluster as an argument.

The script then does the following:

• Runs a series of queries against the Slony-I tables to get lists of nodes, paths, sets, and tables.

• This is stowed in a temporary file in /tmp

• A comparison is done between the present configuration and the configuration the last time the tool was run. If the configuration differs, an email of the difference (generated using diff) is sent to a configurable email address.

• If the configuration has changed, the old configuration file is renamed to indicate when the script noticed the change.

• Ultimately, the current configuration is stowed in LOGDIR in a filename like cluster.last

There is a sample "wrapper" script, slony-cluster-analysis-mass.sh, which sets things up to point to a whole bunch of Slony-I clusters.

This should make it easier for a group of DBAs to keep track of two things:

• Documenting the current state of system configuration.

• Noticing when configuration changes.

21.7. Generating slonik scripts using configure-replication.sh

The tools script configure-replication.sh is intended to automate generating slonik scripts to configure replication. This script is based on the configuration approach taken by the Section 25.

This script uses a number (possibly large, if your configuration needs to be particularly complex) of environment variables to determine the shape of the configuration of a cluster. It uses default values extensively, and in many cases, relatively few environment values need to be set in order to get a viable configuration.

21.8. slon.in-profiles

In the tools area, slon.in-profiles is a script that might be used to start up slon instances at the time of system startup. It is designed to interact with the FreeBSD Ports system.

21.9. duplicate-node.sh

In the tools area, duplicate-node.sh is a script that may be used to help create a new node that duplicates one of the ones in the cluster.

The script expects the following parameters:

• Cluster name

• New node number

• Origin node

• Node being duplicated

• New node

For each of the nodes specified, the script offers flags to specify libpq-style parameters for PGHOST, PGPORT, PGDATABASE, and PGUSER; it is expected that .pgpass will be used for storage of passwords, as is generally considered best practice. Those values may inherit from the libpq environment variables, if not set, which is useful when using this for testing. When "used in anger," however, it is likely that nearly all of the 14 available parameters should be used.

The script prepares files, normally in /tmp, and will report the name of the directory that it creates that contain SQL and slonik scripts to set up the new node.

• schema.sql

  This is drawn from the origin node, and contains the "pristine" database schema that must be applied first.

• slonik.preamble

  This "preamble" is used by the subsequent set of slonik scripts.

• step1-storenode.slonik

  A slonik script to set up the new node.

• step2-storepath.slonik

  A slonik script to set up path communications between the provider node and the new node.

• step3-subscribe-sets.slonik

  A slonik script to request subscriptions for all replications sets.

For testing purposes, this is sufficient to get a new node working. The configuration may not necessarily reflect what is desired as a final state:

• Additional communications paths may be desirable in order to have redundancy.

• It is assumed, in the generated scripts, that the new node should support forwarding; that may not be true.

• It may be desirable later, after the subscription process is complete, to revise subscriptions.