GWME-7.2.1-01 Portal Changes

Problem

GroundWork systems which originally started operating using GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 7.1.0 and earlier releases, and have since been upgraded, missed a few portal changes that were included in a fresh 7.1.1 release. These changes were made in preparation for future development, and their absence did not cause any evident failures at the time. However, the 7.2.1 release depends on those changes in order to provide the Dashboards > Grafana and Dashboards > Hit List menu items.

Separately, a few portal menu-item ordering changes appeared in the GWME 7.2.0 release, and those changes were not covered by either an upgrade to 7.2.0 or a direct upgrade from 7.1.1 to 7.2.1.

Solution

This patch provides the missing portal changes for both conditions, for application to a system which has been directly or indirectly upgraded to 7.2.1 from 7.1.1 or earlier. The associated JIRA (GroundWork internal bug report) is GWMON-13456.

Page Access Permissions
The pages supporting the new Grafana and Hit list menu items will be created with certain GroundWork-standard access permissions. Customers in the habit of modifying such permissions might wish to reach into the portal setup after the Technical Bulletin is applied, and make adjustments to the access permissions on those pages in much the same way as they have done for certain other portal pages. That possible step is noted for completeness, however the procedure for doing so is beyond the scope of this Technical Bulletin.
Installation Steps
Name Size Creator Creation Date Comment  
TB7.2.1-01-portal-changes.tgz 12 kB Glenn Herteg Sep 10, 2018 21:30 MD5: d02e38903542f6a75e3205dca225ba16  

Application of this patch will stop and start the gwservices component, to create safe backup copies of the affected portal databases. The overall effect will be a short (5 minute) outage of portal access; Nagios monitoring will continue undisturbed.

  1. As the root user, copy the attached tarball to an empty directory on the server to be patched.
  2. Unpack the tarball using the command: 
    tar xf TB7.2.1-01-portal-changes.tgz
  3. Change into the directory created by untarring: 
    cd TB7.2.1-01-portal-changes
  4. Run the installer script. 
    ./TB7.2.1-01_install.sh

    The install script will test that you are on a 7.2.1 system (which is required), that you have not already installed this patch, and that you want to go ahead.

  5. The install script requires the GroundWork UI root user and password to make its changes; enter those values when prompted.
    The credentials requested are those that are locally present in the portal's own database. You must specify the root user which is a portal administrator, with a gw-portal-administrator membership, and is a member of the /GWRoot portal group (there is only one which could have been renamed). If you are using LDAP or Active Directory, those are not the credentials to use here.
  6. A backup will be created for uninstallation. The gwservices component will be shut down during this part of the processing, to guarantee that the backed-up databases will be internally consistent.
  7. Updated scripts will be copied into place, and gwservices will be restarted.
  8. The scripts will be run to make the desired portal changes.
Uninstalling

Reversal of this patch will stop and start the gwservices component, to safely restore the backed-up copies of the affected databases. The overall effect will be a short (5 minute) outage of portal access; Nagios monitoring will continue undisturbed.

  1. As the root user, navigate to the patch-unpack directory you created when installing the patch. (If that directory no longer exists, first unpack the patch again.) 
    cd TB7.2.1-01-portal-changes
  2. Run the uninstall command: 
    ./TB7.2.1-01_uninstall.sh

    The gwservices component will be shut down temporarily while the backed-up databases are restored.