Agiloft Setup Assistant
Once
Agiloft is installed, the Setup Assistant can be accessed at any time. To access this menu, open the Setup.exe
file located in your
Agiloft installation directory. A browser window will open and display the main menu.
Status
The Status window tells you whether Agiloft is currently running, and the landing pages to access it.
Settings
The Settings window allows you to manage the amount of ram allocated for the database and application servers. In addition, you can add configuration options for the database and Jboss, and select the database connection type. To see a list of the available JBoss configuration options, click More...
Web Server
Web server settings are defined during initial installation, but can be changed later in the Web server section of the Setup menu. You may change all parameters related to external web server integration, as well as those for the built-in Apache Tomcat server. The input fields are described in more detail in the Database Server section of Agiloft Setup.
Service Control
The Service Control menu contains the settings for Agiloft services. These include:
- How the system should handle stop and restarting the database or JBoss server, and which service should be affected when a start/stop/restart happens
- Memory dumps
- Broadcast messages
- Start/stop timeouts
- Duration of inactivity value for the broadcast message during the outage
- How to monitor the services
Software Update
Updating an Agiloft installation to the latest version is a simple operation requiring almost no user interaction.
- Download the 2017_01 installer package from https://www.agiloft.com/ewdownload/archive/2017_01/ and upgrade your system to 2017_01.
- After the successful upgrade, upgrade to the current version of Agiloft, releases 2017_02 and later.
In general, the update process has the following stages:
- Back up everything that should be backed up. This may include KBs, software code, database files, etc., depending on what is to be updated.
- Obtain new licenses for the new release, if it is a major upgrade with a new main version number.
- Run the automated Agiloft software update to replace installed software and/or data that should be updated.
- Roll back to pre-update state if something goes wrong.
There are three ways to run the update process:
Online update
The online update option is the simplest method. Run Setup and select Software Update from the main menu, then click Check for updates online. Setup will automatically check to see if a new version of Agiloft is available, and if so, will download it and start the update. The user can monitor and set update options using the web interface.
Manual update
If an earlier release of Agiloft is already installed, you can update the software by simply downloading and installing the latest version. Run the downloaded installer as for an initial installation. The installer will detect an existing Agiloft instance and prompt the user about a possible update. Confirm the selection, and the installer performs the update.
Command line utility ewupdate
The ewupdate command line utility performs an update with all default options if run without any arguments. Use the –help option to print a short help screen. If you wish to use the command line updater with non-default options, use the command line arguments listed below.
Command line options
These options are also available using the ewupdate utility. Default options can be changed using the command-line options listed, which correspond to the options presented in web GUI mode. For additional update options, use the –help command to print a list of commands.
Update option | Corresponding ewupdate command-line option | Description |
---|---|---|
Backup database data using OS-level backup | -k,--skiposlevel | This command only applies if the built-in MySQL server is used. Under normal circumstances a full OS-level backup is made. Use this option to skip the default OS-level backup of the MySQL directory. No database restoration will be possible if the upgrade fails. |
Skip checkers unless any patchers were run | -p,--scup | When the application server starts it performs data checks for consistency; data checking may take a long time. Use this option to skip data checking if no data was changed on update. This may speed the application server starting. |
Skip project backup if possible | -K,--skipprjbckp | At the very beginning of the update process all existing projects are saved to the backup directory. If this option is set then no project backup is performed, if allowed. Project backup is required in some update modes. |
Don't delete temporary files after update | -t,--keeptemp | Upon update, temporary files are normally stored on the hard drive. These may include data backups, unpacked new Agiloft code, etc. By default, temporary files are removed after an update. If this option is set then temporary files are left on the device and will only be deleted before the next update. |
Don't backup temporary files - logs etc
| -i,--backuptemp | If this option is set then no temporary files such as log files are backed up before the update. This saves used disk space and shortens elapsed time. |
Update options
Update options allow the user to set certain update process details. When performing an update in web GUI mode, you can change the default options on the update options page, shown below:
Backup
The Backup window allows you to store all Agiloft projects in platform-independent format in a default or chosen directory. These files may be stored as backups, moved to another computer for restoring, etc. Agiloft services are unavailable during the backup process, which may be lengthy depending on the amount of data.
To create a backup...
- Click Backup in the Setup Assistant.
- Select a folder path - either the default, or a custom folder.
- Click Perform backup.
Restore
The Restore window restores all projects stored in
Agiloft format from a default or chosen directory. If the user selects "Purge the database before KnowledgeBases are loaded", all existing projects are deleted before restoration runs. In this case, the admin console KB stored in the file admin.xml.ew
should be present in the backup directory. If no database cleaning is performed before restoration, then to avoid overwriting the active admin console KB, admin.xml.ew
should not be in the directory.
Product Reset
Database resetting performs a low-level erase of the entire Agiloft database and returns the database to a new-install state. For obvious reasons, this option should be used with extreme caution.
Snapshots
A snapshot in Agiloft is a set of files for restoring Agiloft to some previous state of your knowledgebase. A snapshot consists of three parts:
- Installer file.
- Stored project files.
- Agiloft configuration file.
If snapshot storing is enabled, project backups and configuration files from the ‘old’ installation are stored at the beginning of an update. The installer file from the ‘new’ installation is stored at the end of the update. Snapshot names contain the date the update was performed and part of the installer name. The number of snapshots to track is set by the user, but 1-3 snapshots are usually enough.
Maximum number of snapshots: The default value for the maximum number of tracked snapshots is 0 - snapshots are not enabled. To enable snapshots, enter a non-zero value and click Change. If the user enters a number that is less than the number of already existing snapshots, the oldest snapshots are removed.
Delete snapshot: Snapshots can be deleted from the hard disk by selecting the radio button in the Delete column and then pressing the Delete snapshot button.
Restore from snapshot: Restoring from a snapshot installs Agiloft in a special mode and restores projects from stored data. To restore Agiloft from a snapshot, the user must select the Restore column radio button for the selected snapshot, then click Restore from snapshot.
This operation cannot be undone; the current Agiloft state - code, data, and configuration - will be overwritten.
Mail Settings
The Mail settings Setup page allows the user to configure the most common mail system properties. Agiloft processes both inbound and outbound mail. You can disable one or both of these processes by clearing the corresponding check box. For instance, it is typically necessary to turn off email processing before importing a knowledgebase onto a new server.
Disabling email processes is also useful for debugging. The option 'Add a prefix to the subject of all sent mail' can be used for debugging, or to label all emails sent from the server as belonging to a test server.
To disable outgoing or incoming email message processing...
- Navigate to the Mail Settings page of the Setup utility.
- To turn off outbound email, deselect the checkbox next to 'Enable automatic mail sending.'
- To turn off inbound email processing, deselect the checkbox next to 'Enable automatic processing of incoming mail.'
When inbound or outbound mail processing is disabled, messages still waiting to be processed are stored in queues. When mail processing is re-enabled, these messages will be sent or delivered. In order to prevent this, clear the outbound or inbound mail queue before re-enabling email processing.
To clear email queues for the whole server...
- From the Mail settings page, use the following buttons:
- Clear outgoing mail messages queue – this clears any outbound emails stored in the system but not sent.
- Clear incoming mail message queue – this clear any inbound emails received but not yet processed by the system.
Uninstall
To uninstall Agiloft, the user must run the uninstall utility from the Agiloft installation directory. There are two ways to do this.
- Run uninstall manually. For Linux users, the uninstall utility accepts the same command line arguments as the installer: no arguments to run it in GUI mode, -c option to run in console mode and –q option to run in unattended mode, with no prompts or confirmation messages, using all default options.
Or
- Run Setup, then choose Uninstall from the main menu.
After confirming that you really want to uninstall the software, the uninstaller removes the current instance of Agiloft.