Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host, Bret Alarcon, is joined by EDU Manager, Zach Malloch, and Technical Writer, Julia Shefcheck to discuss the process of updating your on-premis RecTrac server. The group touches on how to access the sFTP site to download the update, accessing Open Edge Progress to stop your database from running, and all the pre / post update steps you should be aware of.
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:00
Good well, and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So today's Zack is here to talk a little bit about the upgrade process with RecTrac and how to use the upgrade file. So we've just released a new update. So we decided it's a good time to to run a little refresher course on how to update RecTrac. And kind of point out the more important pieces to the update. Before we get started, though, I want to say if you have any questions, please ask them that little q&a section. That's that little q&a Button at the bottom. And if you have any general comments, you can Click that little chat Button at the bottom and comment away. We also have Julia with us, she's going to be helping us with some of those questions. So thank you, Julia, for popping in and helping with that. I'm gonna hand it over to Zack, and he's going to take it away.
Zach Malloch 0:59
I'm certainly going to try. How's everybody doing today?
Bret Alarcon 1:04
Excellent.
Zach Malloch 1:04
Awesome. Glad to hear that. So yeah, we're working on the wreck RecTrac update, you've probably seen a VSI Connect or VSI Connect going out fairly recently. And sorry, I'm just trying to get my file system up where I can show you where this is actually located. I need to get my VPN going for that. So one moment if you please.
There we go. Windows Explorer,
make you feel better. All right. So yeah, this version of RecTrac, which we just released, earlier this week, I think actually on Memorial or on the 30th or 31st 31st. Yes. So we just released this. And you'll probably want to start with our SFTP site password. So this isn't in the knowledge base. It's under 1516 1516. And it's got the information about how to use the VSI FTP s FTP site. So this is we've had this for a while now. But you know, it's very possible if you haven't updated for a couple of versions that this is since the last time you updated. So just let you know, there is a new method of attaching to our secure transfer file transfer protocol site. And we will as always have our password updated here as well as the instructions on how to get to it as well as links to SFTP file clients. So that would look something like this, I was having trouble getting into it a little bit earlier today. But you would normally put in your SFTP address, the Username, the password, this is port 22. And then we would connect sometimes if too many people connect using the bad or a bad password once it goes into a temporary lockdown. So I will resort to showing you where you can find it in our file structure. So once you connect to the SFTP site, you'll go to files updates and drivers will go down here to
RecTrac.
We've got 3.1. And then we have updates. And from here 3.1 10 and 3.1 10 dot 11 is our most recent Build. So kind of a long path file updates and drivers RecTrac 3.1, updates 3.1 point 10 builds and then here we are 3.1 point 10. The Modifications Listing is very interesting to read through, that's not going to be the focus of today's session, we're going to be focusing on how to actually do the update, particularly because this update itself includes some database changes, which means the database has to be brought down and cannot be actively used while you're running this update. So because it can be a little bit more sensitive. As a result of that, that's where we're going to be this is the actual setup executable, you can download everything in this folder in this compressed zipped folder. So you can just download that one package, and it has all of these documents and everything in it as well as the executable. The executable is really all you absolutely have to have. But we're going to look at the update PDF, which I actually already have open right here. Now this has all of the updates for all of the 3.1 point 10.00 up two point 11 builds, and we have some pre update steps and the pre update note and then if we will down here a little bit further, we do have some post update steps. So we're just going to kind of walk through those. First of all the pre update note. So you do need to be using reCAPTCHA at this point. It's a requirement that has been included with some of our credit card providers that you must use reCAPTCHA my PDF is going super slow, which is interesting. I don't think I've ever had PDF
specifically not want to load up?
Well, we'll close it down, we'll open it again and see what's
there. Okay, here we
go. So here's the pre update notes. I'll Zoom in. Zoom in a little bit here. So you must have reCAPTCHA setup, there is a knowledge base article about all of this. So if you don't know what reCAPTCHA is, send somebody from your IT side, or administrator over to read this article, it'll get them set up with that information. With our pre update steps, we basically need to take all of the databases and app servers and web speed agents down. And the order that we're doing this is important. So we want to make an online backup of the RecTrac database that happens while the database is actually up and running. And we use our buddy here, the DB utilities. I like to run these as administrator just to kind of be make sure that I'm using kind of high access to it. And then we can do our truncate RBI will come back to do this one. But the online database backup is just way of making a backup right now. So if there's something catastrophic, that happens, your database, whatever the last backup is, what you're going to go back to. So because this is changing database structure, if something goes wrong, if the system crashes, the power goes out in the middle of the update might get into an incomplete status. And we want to be able to restore back to something immediately prior to this. So we're going to choose online database backup, we'll hit next, we'll browse to your database. I think probably everybody understands this has to be done on your RecTrac server where the database actually lives. It's not on any client machines. But I'll say that out loud, just to make sure we're on the same page, we navigate to that database, we hit process, I'm not going to do this because it can take 10 to 30 minutes, it could take a little bit longer depending on the configuration of your server, the size of your RecTrac database, the amount of RAM that you have your processor can architecture and the like. So this is kind of the first step with database utilities taking an online backup. The rest of this, we're now going to get into the OpenEdge. Explorer. So that is access to the browser and on the server, it's by going to localhost 9094, you'll be presented with Username and password, your default Username and password will work unless you've customized that which you would hopefully then know that you've done. And we're going to start with the databases here. Actually, no, I'm sorry, the Yeah, we're starting with the app servers and the Web Suite brokers and then the databases, databases are kind of first in last out. So this would be the last out of the water, we're closing on the pool for a little bit. When we start everything back up. They're the first ones that get back and then everything builds on top.
So we will just come in here and highlight our app servers event Demo event live VIC Demo, VIC live. And our web clients are web speed client Demo client live web Demo web live. And we will stop all of those. And then once we have the not running status on those guys, we can come in here and grab our Demo database and our live database and hit stop on those as well. And for some reason, mine already said not running, but I was in the database, I know that that's not necessarily accurate. And then if I come to try to hit my database, and I hit refresh, it should try for a minute and then give me a web speed 6019 error message. And this would be the same thing for WebTrac. While this is down, nobody can use either side of the system. So we can kind of see that still spinning. And then that's the error message I would expect to see from both of these.
So then going back to our document, everything has been stopped. So now we're going to verify that they all have a status of not running, do tells us everything here verify the database has the status of not running. And then we get down to the bulk of the actual process, which is running the Build. So we download the file, we have it locally built, we need to run this not only on the RecTrac server, but you also want to run it on WebTrac. Now on the WebTrac server, you won't have the app servers, you won't have the databases so you can just run the executable there. You don't have to do the stop piece. But when you're running it on the RecTrac server, it will attach to the disabled database this stopped database and then process those changes and updates to it.
Bret Alarcon 9:53
Hey Zach!
Zach Malloch 9:54
Yes.
Bret Alarcon 9:56
Question about the pre update steps. Actually pre and post Oh, Joyce wants to know, for hosted customers, do we need to worry about doing the pre and post update steps? If so, when should these be completed?
Zach Malloch 10:08
That's a good question. Um, so for hosted, you don't have to worry about this at all hosted will take care of this update for you. I believe June 7 is when they're planning on taking things down the evening of June 7. So when you come in on June 8, you should have the updated version of the database, so you don't have to do anything. It's a good question. And good to call that out.
Bret Alarcon 10:30
And Keith's wondering if we can Build a nicer looking web speed default maintenance page where we can put up a note.
Zach Malloch 10:38
So actually, you can put up a note there. But yeah, I don't know why we've never just made a default look a little bit nicer than that. But would you make a note to maybe write that up that?
Bret Alarcon 10:49
Sure!
Zach Malloch 10:49
I think that would be attainable, potentially, from our crack team of developers?
Bret Alarcon 10:54
Of course.
Zach Malloch 10:56
Sometimes we just need to connect the two pieces. Oh, yeah, that is kind of an error message that doesn't really look all that good. And doesn't really tell customer facing for sure. What's going on here. So yeah, we're in a currently down state. So if I bring up my very messy desktop, there's my setup file. If I right Click on this and run this as administrator once again, then we will get the interface which is going to be very minimal for actually running the update.
Fact. I thought we were going to run it anyway. Go out on a limb here.
And I might not actually run this file because it could take a little bit of time. Just got another little warning message popping up. I'll see if I can move these windows on to the other side. Yeah. So no, that's still the backup request. So we just get this message RecTrac 3.1 needs to be updated. Would you like to update RecTrac? If I say yes, that starts the process. But it could take the rest of RecChat if I actually start the process and have it run here. So I'm going to say no. And instead, we'll basically pretend that it finished and finished successfully. Now this is the part that this could take a while it could take half an hour, it could take you know in the document, we say it could take up to two hours. So you want to make sure that you're prepared to be down for kind of that outside Window. And then give it plenty of time to run and just be patient with it and let it go. You don't want to stop it in the middle of the process. But if we pretend that that just ran, then once again, going to the document here. Now I'm going to go back up to my table of contents, get this to a more reasonable size. And we'll jump down to the 3.1 point 10 point 11 Post update steps. And so now we can see that use the database utilities to truncate the BI file for both live and Demo databases. So this is the DB utilities Window, and I have truncate as my default, I hit Next. And I think everybody should be on 11.7 At this point with this version of RecTrac. But if you know that you're not you can switch it but everybody else would be 11.7, we browse to our database file. This is a live file, if we go back to data, we can switch over to Demo, we do want to do this once for each of them. But while they are stopped, so I'll just go ahead and do this for mine. It doesn't hurt anything to run this multiple times. But you do want to make sure you run it at least the one time. So actually, I think I can kind of show what's happening when we run this for those that might be a little bit curious.
Bret Alarcon 14:00
MainTrac data live.
Zach Malloch 14:01
So we have these b one, b two and B three files. And yeah, you won't actually be able to see anything different. But these are kind of the before image. So we use these as kind of scratch space for some of our upgrade processes. And what truncating will do is it'll go through and just clear out anything that's not necessary to keep here. So we're going to hit process on that. It shouldn't take very long. Like I said, we don't really see any change here. If I refresh this hitting f5 It will basically look the same. Oops, that was not the Button I meant to hit. I think it was the Button but it wasn't doing the right function. Well anyway, yes. Here's my folder. So
see where that function there it
is function f5 on my keyboard, so it doesn't really do anything visible. If this file had gotten to be much larger, we would have In this snap right back down to 16 kilobytes, and if I had actually run the process, it probably would have extended a little bit. But once we did that truncate, then we just reverse the process over here. So databases are first ones into the pool. So we start both of them up. And we want to wait until we see the running status, it can take a moment for that to happen. And actually, that we will be able to see that this guy, this LK file just popped back up. That's our lock file, which indicates the database is actually starting and running. So now we can see that those are running. And then we come up to our app servers, get them a little start.
And technically, I
could have also selected the web speed clients and started them as well. So the order is really just making sure that live and Demo are running first. You know, there's probably people here who have started everything all at once and been just fine or even tried to start the app servers, and event pieces first. As long as you get everything started, you know, they they have a bit of a startup process. And so they'll keep trying for a little bit. But definitely the the all of these are dependent on the database as being running. So especially if like you're trying to start the clients and waiting for them to start before the database is get started, you won't ever really have that happen. But then once all of these are started back up, then we should start to get into the database again. And then once again, assuming that we had run the actual file. And I'll probably do that after we finish our session here. Once we log back in the version, if we look at our sidebar should report, the updated Build to 3.1 point 10 point 11. Right there. So that would be your verification afterwards. So that is kind of the the process for this one. You know, the getting into the Progress Explorer tool, making sure everything stopped before running it that is once again a little bit the difference between this update and some of the others. So yeah, that's just wanted to kind of show you hands on how we do that.
Bret Alarcon 17:20
Looks like Jerry has a question.
If you have time at the end, can you share some of the info on the new application features and the new database scheme? And will enable or sorry, schema will enable but benefits can we look forward to?
Zach Malloch 17:36
Yeah, so what we might do is have somebody from the product side sit in with us next week, or two weeks from now to kind of talk a little bit more about the Modifications Listing. So basically, all of these nine pages are all the individual program changes, getting the same thing where this PDF isn't moving all the way. But these are other programming changes that have happened. But as Jerry mentioned, there's actually a there's another question coming in. So just one moment. So Jerry is asking about the database schema. So there are some changes, that's one of the reasons this, we have to stop the database at this point. So we can add new tables to it. The idea is that we're now getting ready to do some fairly big performance improvements, or at least like starting to change some of the, the processes processes that we have in RecTrac. So for this past, I guess because of the pandemic, like you know, 24 months or so, we were initially going to roll out the Next Gen UI, which was you know, the skin change the way that RecTrac looks, but not really the way it operates. So that's the first part of that change. And then once everybody was updated to that, or while we were still in that migration process, we weren't going to do any big, significant user experience changes. So we did the user interface change. Now we're focusing on user experience. So simplifying the way that some programs work, changing the flow of some programs to make them more efficient, things that we couldn't necessarily do with some of the limitations that the old UI had. But we were developing everything in parallel, we released a new feature in the new version of the UI. We also did it in the old version, now that the new UI is mandatory. We're starting to change some of the back end stuff. So this is once again, kind of getting ready to start doing some more of those changes, even though you might not see too much, nothing real big, immediately released. So not not a real answer, Jerry, I'm sorry. But basically, this is just making it so that we can do more as we keep going.
Bret Alarcon 19:48
In Yeah, Steve's questions. Do we start the WebTrac update now that the RecTrac database and applications are running?
Zach Malloch 19:58
Yeah. So with the web WebTrac thing you can do it at exactly the same time. It doesn't care if the database is up and running or not the the main thing that you don't want to do is update WebTrac significantly before you do go to take down the database or let people use WebTrac. While it's on the old version and RecTrac. On the new version, there can sometimes be some program mismatches. And you get some weird stuff happening. So ideally, you want to do it around the same time. Yeah, and Julia mentions that the VSI, or the VSI, Connect that went out with the announcement of what this what this update does also kind of highlighted a few changes that are, you know, everything's in the mod listing. But obviously, it's a nine page document, not everybody's going to go through that line by line. So we do try to highlight some elements, when we send out those VSI or vs connects.
I don't see any other questions coming in at the moment. So Joyce is asking something and actually for this, I'm just going to go to that VSI Connect email. See if I can read it from there. I think that went out on went Tuesday.
Julia Shefcheck 21:16
I have it reads during your standard maintenance Window.
Zach Malloch 21:19
Yep, that makes sense. That doesn't look very good. Well, there's that email just loaded. Yeah. So during the monthly maintenance Window, it says, intended implementation date and time six, seven at 11:30pm. Mountain Standard Time. So yeah, this is for people that are in Mountain Standard. I think I also saw one that's for different timezone, potentially. But they're all going to be right around that time. So yeah, between when you go home at night and get in the morning, hopefully.
Bret Alarcon 22:06
There's a another question. When do online backup? Where does that data go? I always said local backups.
Zach Malloch 22:13
Yeah. So I mean, it's probably just going to go into your RecTrac directory, or actually VSI three directory in this backup folders is the default. You know, technically, there are other ways of doing these backups, you don't have to use the utility, you can run the event and RecTrac, kind of kick it off manually. And then it'll just put it in wherever your standard backup folder happens to be. So like if I was in RecTrac, here, and I went to scheduled events.
And I find my database backup. And I run that event now it will kick off a new backup immediately. And I can just look at my backup folder and just kind of checked to see when this date and time updates. So that that's these are all old backup files. So hopefully you don't nope, that's a good one. So that was from today. Or no last week. But if I ran this, I'd want to wait until I see the time to verify that I have that backup. Yeah, running, the utility will just default to this directory. Whereas this guy knows that if we're specifying a different directory, we'll use that instead.
That's a good question. All right. Well,
I think that that, is it. I'll speak a little bit slowly up. There we go. Yes, the recordings are always available. Well, except for the one time we didn't make a recording. But we came back and and re recorded that one. So right now, it's going to be the RecChat archive. So you jump into the support page, exactly the same place you go to look at the knowledge base, but you drop down and you can get to record chats. And then, Bret, probably by the end of the day tomorrow, we'll have this one posted up here and Okay. Well, I think that we'll bring this in for a landing. So, Bret, if you want to take us out? I think that we're good. Okay. One last question from John, will the schema change affect customer reports? So I don't anticipate that any report that you have right now would be affected by this. I don't think any of the schema changes actually related to reporting. There is the possibility that if we add new fields, it would make new things available to reporting but I think our goal would certainly be not to affect any of the custom reports that currently exist.
Good question there. Okay,
so got some thank yous very happy to provide information. Hopefully everybody's having a good week. Good short week here, one more day to go and we'll see you the week after or next week will be virtual symposium week. After that we'll have a new RecChat topic, whether it's highlighting certain changes from this Build or something else. Let us know if you have any particular ideas, and I'll talk to everybody soon. See you later.