FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Table of Contents

• Should I use subdomains or /pathnames/ for my LA Services?
• Help!, I don't have access to my Collectory Admin section, e.g. https://collections.my.site/admin/
• So what happens when I rerun the ansible? it doesn’t like make two versions of everything?
• If I change some variable in my inventories, shall I run all these roles and tasks again?
• Collectory cache issues

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Should I use subdomains or /pathnames/ for my LA Services?

When you are planning your LA node you have to choose which domain and/our subdomains to use, and in definitive how your urls will looks like.

Some nodes prefer to use subdomains urls like https://services.l-a.site and others like https://l-a.site/services/ using pathnames. You can have a lock to this LA node list for some production urls. It's up to you the election.

With more samples:

1. https://biocache.l-a.site/ and https://biocache-ws.l-a.site/ (for the biocache webservices)
2. or https://biocache.l-a.site/ and https://biocache.l-a.site/ws/ or even https://l-a.site/biocache/ and https://l-a.site/biocache/ws/

However, nowadays both options have some minor issue that we are trying to solve:

1. if you use always subdomains for every LA module, you probably get some CORS errors than normal
2. when you use /paths/ and you install several LA modules in the same server with the same hostname via ansible, the nginx_vhost role, it will overwrite previous vhosts configurations that use the same hostname. See ala-install#256 and some workaound.

In other words, in you deploy https://biocache.l-a.site/ and later https://biocache.l-a.site/ws/ in the same sever, at the end ningx_vhost ansible role will only configure the last one (because the first is overwriten).

But if you deploy https://biocache.l-a.site/ and later https://biocache-ws.l-a.site/ you will suffer some extraCORS issue that you have to solve later.

Probably ALA uses biocache and biocache/ws/ in different servers (same with bie/species) so they don't suffer these issues.

We are trying to find some patch to ala-install to improve both situations.

Help!, I don't have access to my Collectory Admin section, e.g. https://collections.my.site/admin/

First, check that you have the correct roles assigned to your user, see User-Roles-and-Services. Adding only the ADMIN role is actually not enough to get admin rights to manage the collectory.

But if you have the correct roles, but you still don't can create collections, etc, it may be a problem with the authentication cache. Try logging out and in again, or logging in with a different browser.

So what happens when I rerun the ansible? it doesn’t like make two versions of everything?

It's quite common to rerun ansible with ala-install from time to time, for instance to upgrade some LA service, etc.

In general you repeat the same tasks. If you changed some variable in your inventories, it will reconfigure your service using it. If you update ala-install you will use new versions and/or configuration variables.

The only exception are probably solr, cassandra (this is biocache backend) and nameindex:

• solr: because ala-install tries to create the cores and fails. Use --skip (see below)
• cassandra: because removes the cassandra data so it's better to skip if you already ingested data (this is done because if you have a cluster, you have to start from zero in new cassandra nodes).
• nameindex: you repeat the same task (download, unzip, backup previous namedindex) and at the end you are out of disk because /data/lucene is full of nameindex copies.

So better --skip nameindex,solr7_create_cores,cassandra if you are using ansible-playbook or --skip=nameindex,solr7_create_cores,cassandra if you are using the LA generator ansiblew wrapper.

Also you can use --tags properties with ansible-playbook (or -p with ansiblew wrapper) if you only want to propagate new properties variable changes. This will not work with CAS and Spatial because the way these playbooks are written including roles, see tag inheritance.

If I change some variable in my inventories, shall I run all these roles and tasks again?

It depends, if in only some minor adjustment (live some service minor parameter, etc), you can run ansible with --tags properties.

Some ansible roles restarts tomcat after changing the properties (other not). A faster way to restart some tomcat service is to do a "touch" a war or a deployed file, like:

touch /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps-species.l-a.site/ROOT.war

to reload that service. This is more faster that service tomcat7 restart.

Other services has a /alaAdmin/ interface with a button to reload the configuration.

Collectory cache issues

There is also some weird aspect with collectory and biocache caches when running in the same server

If this collectory cache is disabled you'll get ids instead of collections or institutions names in some parts or biocache searches like charts and facets.