Avaya Server File Management

5 techniques to learn Avaya Linux tools and file delivery with RPMs and TAR

By the time you finish reading this post, Avaya Server File Management, you will be able to understand the analogy of the files responsible for patching the Avaya Servers, and furthermore the steps you must take to analyze the Avaya Server conditions, and how to manage packages within the file structure.

Not so long ago, I was patching a series of Avaya Servers in the Northeast section of the peninsula. This particular customer had a couple of Core S8800s, MMs, Witness, etc. After they conducted a network audit, they found out that the Avaya Servers running linux had to be patched with the Avaya Linux Vulnerability Patch. Once I had downloaded the patch to the local Avaya Server, I couldn’t install it due to version mismatch. To help you avoid making the same troubleshooting mistakes, I have put together these bullet points=

• 1.- Health status commands
• 2.- Packages – RPMs and Tarball
• 3.- What is RPMs and tar?
• 4.- Benefits of verifying the RPMs
• 5.- The md5sum Utility

1.- Health status commands

The following commands to determine if there were alarms or errors are generated under the CM Server

• server -c – Provide continuous server information (CM only)
• restartcause – self explanatory (tested on cm only)
• almdisplay (display alarms – CM only)
• almsummary (summarizes all alarms under cm)
• hardware_info – Display server Core CPUs, Memory and HDD information under CM.
• last dadmin – Displays login sessions based on login accounts
• Uptime – Checks for server start-up times
• netstat -s – Displays TCP/UDP/ICMP packets information
• top -u dadmin – Displays all processes running by the dadmin account
• statapp – Outputs the processes status. (CM only)
• grep -i error messages – egrep for extended grep or grep expressions are used to search within a particular file, in this case, ‘messages’ which records errors produced by CM and stored under the /var/log directory. Once you have analyzed the file, you can zero in by searching on that particular error or message within the file. e.g egrep -i rc=1792 messages.
• almdisplay -res|more – Displays resolved alarms.
• vmstat – Displays CM status (For disk diagnostics run vmstat -d)

You also might want to look at /var/log/ecs/ directory where log files get created containing system events, these can be from sip trunks errors, to any denial events generated by the system.

• netstat -a | grep sip (Protocol) – Displays any SIP/TCP/HTTP/FTP stablished sessions.
• filesync -H all – Display the history of the save trans including licenses. Another alternative is to run = grep ‘filesync -d’ commandhistory* from the /var/logs/ecs directory to find any events related to file negociation

2.- Packages – RPMs and tarball

Although we are not suppose to download or are unable to directly download RPMs from any Web repository, one thing we can do is to verify the packages that are already installed in our system. In some cases you may need to update the Core software due to bugs or a corrupted file, and by installing patches or service packs you can fix these issues.

Service Packs and Patches can be downloaded from PLDS or the http://support.avaya.com then transferred over via SMI or SFTP/FTP.

3.- What is an RPM, and tar file?

RPMs – These are linux formatted files similar to what we know as EXE in the Microsoft-Windows world. It is a set of files compiled into one, these files are normally available on PLDS or any Web repository.

Tarball (filename.tar) – Compressed files into a single one. To learn more about tar utility run the man pages (command= man tar). GZIP and CPIO are similar utilities. Similar to ZIP on Windows.

4.- Benefits of verifying the RPMs

When downloading software you will run the risk of data corruption, and it is important to verify each downloaded file, if possible. For these types of files there are some utility commands available to us to avoid future system crashes.

These are some of the RPMs commands available to us=

• rpm -qa | more – Display all RPMs installed the “ | more” it will pause the output enabling the reader to stop and read through each page.
• rpm -qi RPMname  – Display the RPM information. e.g “rpm -qi wireshark”
• rpm -ql RPMname – Display the list of RPMs related.
• rpmverify – Displays the directory housing the RPM file

5.- The md5sum Utility

When combined with a wildcard it analyzes the RPM file, and it produces the hexadecimal number that correspond to this RPM file.

When downloading patches, service packs, or ISOs from PLDs, it is important to record the md5 checksum value and compare it whenever running this utility.

md5sum -c FILENAME.RPM

Other ways to verify service packs and patches

Update_show – Displays file name, status if activated or not, type of update (hot or cold), and update description.

update_info – Display patch and service pack information.

Which maintenance command do you use, to first diagnose any kernel related issues?

Resources

Avaya Integrated Mgmt – Administering Red-Hat Linux

Avaya linux vulnerability patch

Avaya Shell Basics