ESLM & MFDS control commands

We need to know your product, version, and platform.

Please don't send me personal messages - they don't work properly, and other people can't see them. Post responses in the thread.

Hi Michael,

Please see details below.

Product - Microfocus COBOL

Version - 6.0.00

Platform - Linux 2.6.18-128.el5

details from cobver file

cobol v6.0.00

PRN=RXCTU/AAJ:9o.a2.60.04

PTI=32/64 bit

PTI=SP1

PTI=ES

Unfortunately that doesn't tell me what version of ES you're actually running. (I believe there's some way to look that up from the PRN, but I don't know what it is.)

In ES 6.0 SP1 WS1 and later, and possibly in earlier versions, MFDS supports the -S command-line option, which will ask a running MFDS instance to shut down:

mfds -S 1 [userid password]

Supply userid and password if MFDS security is enabled. Use "mfds -S 2" to also ask MFDS to tell any running ES instances to shut down.

For eslm, if you have the eslmfgetpv utility in $COBVER/bin, you can use:

eslmfgetpv k

I'm not sure which products include eslmfgetpv. If you don't have it, you should open an incident with Micro Focus Customer Care to find out whether it's available.

Hi Michael,

Our scripts have "mfds64 /d" to start MFDS server and "mfds64 -s" to stop MFDS server. But stop command didn't help to stop MFDS, resulting us to use kill -9 to stop it. I'll try with your commands above and let you know the results.

Regards, Priyesh

Hi Michael,

Our scripts have "mfds64 /d" to start MFDS server and "mfds64 -s" to stop MFDS server. But stop command didn't help to stop MFDS, resulting us to use kill -9 to stop it. I'll try with your commands above and let you know the results.

Regards, Priyesh

"mfds64 -s" is not a valid MFDS command line. It needs to be at least "mfds64 -S 1" or "mfds64 -S 2", and if MFDS security is enabled, you'll also have to supply credentials.

And why are you using the -d (or /d) option to start MFDS? That's only recommended for debugging purposes, and most of the output is only useful for Micro Focus Development anyway. MFDS already keeps a journal of messages - there's rarely any reason to use the -d option.

Hi Michael....I'm Bill Comin and I work with Priyesh.  The tests he ran were on a 64-bit Linux version. At the time we needed a Unix sysadmin on the task to run any commands requiring root access.  I decided to try running the recommended commands on an older machine we have that runs 5.1.1.0/wrap pack 3, but also allows our group root privileges to certain command paths (via sudo). I ran the command  "sudo /opt/product/mfc/5.1.3/bin/mfds -S 1" and got a response "Processing -S option..." and the version of the MFDS daemon, but the MFDS was still left standing.  My question is in regard to credentials. How do we know what username to use for the ' mfds -S 1 [username password] ' command?  The mfds command's owner is 'mfc', for which the SA's do not allow password access.

The optional username and password for "mfds -S" are in the context of MFDS security, not OS security. It's possible to configure MFDS security so those are the same security domain, but that's relatively uncommon.

If you don't have MFDS security configured, then you don't need credentials. If you do have MFDS security configured, I can't tell you what credentials to use or how to find them without knowing more about your MFDS security configuration. MFDS and ES have a pluggable security mechanism (the External Security Facilty, or ESF), and MFDS also has a legacy built-in security manager; so there are a number of possibilities.

Out of the box, MFDS does not have security enabled.

Another possible problem is that when you run "mfds -S" it's not able to bind its local socket or connect to the running MFDS. It may be trying to bind a privileged port by default; I haven't looked into what the code does in any detail. I can do some experimenting but I'm out of the office until Tuesday. I'll also pass this on to the relevant developer team.

If the mfds -s command has an issue sending the request to the mfds process you are attempting to terminate, it should report an error and exit the process with a non-zero return code. You can also specify "mfds -d -s" and more information will be output. Note that the "-d" must prefix the "-s".

On the receiving mfds process side the mfds journal should log any shutdown request that's received. You will see something like this in the journal console:

MC0039I Processing MFDS_CONTROL_SHUTDOWN request...

If there is an issue with any input credentials you will see:

MC0038E Refused: requester has insufficient privileges

or other error message. These messages will also be logged in the console output if you have the -d startup option specified in the target mfds process, although as Michael has noted, the -d option should really only be used for debugging purposes. The journal output can be accessed via the mfds HTML UI and exported in text format from there also.