Cisco Broadband Access Center Administrator s Guide for 3.6

Managing Broadband Access Center

This chapter describes the various subcomponents within Cisco Broadband Access Center (BAC) that you can use to manage the system. The subcomponents are:

•Cisco BAC Process Watchdog

•Administrator User Interface

•Command Line Interface

•SNMP Agent

•Cisco BAC Tools

Cisco BAC Process Watchdog

The Cisco BAC process watchdog is an administrative process that monitors the runtime health of all Cisco BAC processes. This watchdog process ensures that, if a process stops unexpectedly, it is automatically restarted. One instance of the Cisco BAC process watchdog runs on every system which runs Cisco BAC components.

You can use the Cisco BAC watchdog as a command-line tool to start, stop, restart, and determine the status of any monitored processes.

If a monitored application fails, it restarts automatically. If, for any reason, the restart process also fails, the Cisco BAC watchdog process server will wait a prescribed amount of time before attempting to restart again.

The period between restart attempts starts at 1 second and increases exponentially with every subsequent attempt until it reaches a length of 5 minutes. After that, the process restart is attempted at 5-minute intervals until successful. Five minutes after a successful restart, the period is automatically reset to 1 second again.

For example:

•Process A fails.

•The Cisco BAC process watchdog server attempts to restart it and the first restart fails.

•The Cisco BAC process watchdog server waits 2 seconds and attempts to restart the process and the second restart fails.

•The Cisco BAC process watchdog server waits 4 seconds and attempts to restart the process and the third restart fails.

•The Cisco BAC process watchdog server waits 16 seconds and attempts to restart the process.

Using Cisco BAC Process Watchdog from the Command Line

The Cisco BAC watchdog agent automatically starts whenever the system boots up. Consequently, this watchdog also starts those Cisco BAC system components installed on the same system. You can also control the Cisco BAC watchdog through a simple command-line utility by running the /etc/init.d/bprAgent command.

Table 9-1 describes the command line interface commands available for use with the Cisco BAC watchdog process.

Note When the Solaris operating system is rebooted, the Cisco BAC process watchdog is first stopped, allowing Cisco BAC servers to shut down properly. To shut down or reboot the operating system, use the Solaris shutdown command. Remember, the Solaris reboot command does not execute application shutdown hooks and kills Cisco BAC processes rather than shuts them down. While this action is not harmful to Cisco BAC, it may delay server start-up and skew certain statistics and performance counters.

The events that trigger an action in the Cisco BAC watchdog daemon, including process crashes and restarts, are logged in a log file, BPR_HOME/agent/logs/agent.log. The watchdog daemon also logs important events to syslog under standard local6 facility.

Administrator User Interface

The Cisco BAC administrator user interface is a web-based application for central management of the Cisco BAC system. You can use this interface to:

•Configure global defaults

•Define custom properties

•Set up Classes of Service

•Manage firmware rules and configuration templates

•Add and edit device information

•Group devices

•Execute device operations

•View server status and statistics

•View device history

•View server logs

•Manage users

Refer to these chapters for specific instructions on how to use this interface:

•Understanding the Administrator User Interface, describes how to access and configure the Cisco BAC administrator user interface.

•Using the Administrator User Interface, provides instructions for performing administrative activities involving the monitoring of various Cisco BAC components.

•Configuring Broadband Access Center, describes tasks that you perform to configure Cisco BAC.

Command Line Interface

The Cisco BAC CLI is an IOS-like command line interface which you use to configure as well as view the status of the DPE by using Telnet. The CLI supports built-in command help and command autocompletion.

You can enable authentication of the CLI through a locally configured login and enable passwords, or through a remote username and password for a TACACS+ service.

To access the DPE CLI, open a Telnet session to port 2323 from a local or remote host.

Accessing the DPE CLI from a Local Host

To access the CLI from a local host, you can use:

# telnet localhost 2323

or

# telnet 0 2323

Accessing the DPE CLI from a Remote Host

To access the CLI from a remote host, enter:

# telnet remote-hostname 2323

Note If you cannot establish a Telnet connection to the CLI, the CLI server might not be running. You may need to start the server; enter:
# /etc/init.d/bprAgent start cli

After you access the CLI, you must enter the DPE password to continue. The default login and enable passwords are changeme.

See the Cisco Broadband Access Center DPE CLI Reference 3.6, for specific information on the CLI commands that a DPE supports.

SNMP Agent

Cisco BAC provides basic SNMP v2-based monitoring of the DPE and RDU servers. The Cisco BAC SNMP agents support SNMP informs and traps. You can configure the SNMP agent on the DPE by using the snmp-server CLI commands, and on the RDU by using SNMP configuration CLI commands.

The SNMP agent also provides support for monitoring essential Cisco BAC details, such as server state, server-specific statistics, communication between servers, and license information.

For additional information on the SNMP configuration command line tool, see Monitoring Broadband Access Center. For additional information on the DPE CLI, refer to the Cisco Broadband Access Center DPE CLI Reference 3.6.

Cisco BAC Tools

Cisco BAC provides automated tools that you use to perform certain functions more efficiently. Table 9-2 lists the various tools that this Cisco BAC release supports: