PMDF Installation Guide
Tru64 UNIX Edition


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1.2 Preliminary Tasks for New Installations

There are several tasks that should be performed before you install PMDF for the first time. These tasks are discussed in the next sections.

1.2.1 Add Two User Accounts

You must add two user accounts for PMDF to the system password file. You must also specify (but not create) the accounts' home directories. Use the vipw utility to edit the system password file (/etc/passwd) and add the accounts. (Do not use adduser, as that will create home directories.) Specify pmdf as the first username, with /pmdf/queue as its home directory. Specify pmdfuser as the second username, also using /pmdf/queue as its home directory. Make sure that the user ids and group ids for the pmdf and pmdfuser accounts are unique from each other, as well as from all other accounts on your system. For example, if your system has no accounts with user id or group id 30 or 31, then the following examples are valid entries to the /etc/passwd file:


pmdf:*:30:30:PMDF:/pmdf/queue:/bin/sh 
pmdfuser:*:31:31:PMDF user:/pmdf/queue:/bin/sh 

1.2.2 Install All Required Patches to the Tru64 UNIX Operating System

Contact Hewlett-Packard for a list of patches that are recommended for your version of Tru64 UNIX.

1.2.3 Check System Kernel Parameters

The default values for the Tru64 UNIX system kernel parameters (such as max-proc-per-user and max-threads-per-user) might be too low for a medium or large PMDF system.

Note

PMDF jobs that process messages will normally be running under the pmdf account. PMDF also includes many multithreaded components (such as the PMDF SMTP client), as well as the Dispatcher and the servers that run under it (such as the SMTP, POP3, and IMAP servers).
Therefore, you need to allow enough processes and threads per user to handle the expected number of PMDF processes and threads.

To determine the maximum number of threads needed by PMDF, you need to find the total number of threads that will potentially be used by the Job Controller and the Dispatcher services:
Total_threads = J_threads + D_threads

For the Job Controller, compute the number of queues that run outbound TCP/IP channel jobs times the JOB_LIMIT for each queue times the MAX_CLIENT_THREADS channel option, plus the JOB_LIMIT for each other queue (that is, those running single threaded jobs), plus the sum of all the Job Controller's JOB_LIMIT values (as one thread is used by the Job Controller per job as overhead), plus a few more threads for general Job Controller management overhead:
Jthreads = Sumnon-TCP/IP queues (job_limit+1) + SumTCP/IP queues (job_limit*max_client_threads + 1) + a few

For the Dispatcher services, compute
Dthreads = 3 + Sumservices (2+NUM_PORTS + MAX_PROCS*(3+MAX_CONNS)) where ports = number of ports that the service listens on.

The current values of your system kernel parameters can be viewed by using one of the following commands:


# sysconfigdb -l
or


# sysconfig -q proc

If the current values are not high enough for the sort of PMDF load you expect, increase the values (using the sysconfigdb utility), and then reboot your system so that the increases will take effect.


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