2. Administrative tasks (saving data and configuration)

Administrative tasks cover the following activities:

• Managing an installation's configuration files using a Source Code Management tool (SCM).
• Backing up experimental data, and getting it off Odin, in a format understandable by your experimental tool chain. In practice, this often means producing a text report and/or exporting Odin data to a separate database.

2.1 Managing your configuration using a SCM tool

It is very useful to have some kind of source control in place as a way of tracking the changes that were made throughout the Odin install life.

If you have set up your own SCM, it can be used to house Odin configuration files.

If you have developer access to the Odin code repository, you may simply commit a new configuration (and update existing one) to the Odin trunk. Configuration files are placed in their own folder under the ‘config’ folder at the Odin root. To add a new configuration, simply create a matching folder and put the configuration files there. Then commit your changes to the repository.

2.2 Easily deploying configuration files

It is important to be able to quickly restore a broken install, or to duplicate an existing install from scratch. A way to achieve this is to write up a small script that copies all of the configuration files within the corresponding ‘config’ subfolder to their “real” places in the system. See ‘config/config_unit200_lbe/deploy.sh’ for an example.

Idea for a future development: standardize a hierarchy for an environment (ie set of configuration file) and create a universal deployment script that copies the contents of this hierarchy to the system.

2.3 Exporting experimental data

Odin currently provides no standard mechanism to back up your data from its stores, and to export it. It is currently left up to the Installer. That said, examples are available as part of the sample configurations that come with the Odin source, in the ‘config’ directory.

This document was generated by Fabien Dilet on July, 21 2010 using texi2html 1.78.