System administrator tasks

The application administration consists of several tasks that the system administrator must perform with care and precision.

Act as contact person

The system administrator is the contact person between a company and LN. The application administrator is responsible to find a solution for the questions and problems brought forward by the LN users. If required, this task is performed by contacting one of the Global Support Centers.

Have extensive knowledge about the application environment

The system administrator must know in which directories the LN application resides. For example, to make a backup or to rebuild tables, the system administrator must know the exact location of the files and programs involved.

Reorganize tables

The system administrator must frequently reorganize the database tables because the disk space of deleted records is not immediately given back to the system. In other words, although many records in a table are deleted, the size of the table itself does not become smaller. Only after the table is reorganized the disk space of the deleted records becomes available on the system. Reorganizing the database tables becomes important when many records in tables are deleted.

Control disk space

The system administrator must regularly check the disk space on the system because a lack of disk space can cause application errors.

Remove temporary files

LN can create several temporary files that, after use, are no longer useful. To save disk space, the system administrator must remove the temporary files on a regular basis.

Create back-up files

To prevent a loss of data, the system administrator must create back-up files on a regular basis. The reason to make back-up files is so if a file is damaged, the original file can be retrieved from the back-up files.

Control user management

Before a user can work with LN, the system administrator must first define the user data. To avoid the unauthorized use of programs, user authorizations are defined in roles that can be linked to the individual users.

Install updates

If LN sends an update of the LN software, the system administrator must install the update on the system as soon as possible.

Log changes in the system

The system administrator must log the changes to the system. An administrator can change many aspects in the system, for example, the printer definition files. The logged information can be useful for problem solving.

Perform all initialization procedures

The system administrator must know all initialization procedures, for example:

  • How to create a new company number
  • How to enter data for a new company number
  • How to copy an existing company number to another company number. See the Copy companies (ttaad1231m000) session or the To copy a multicompany structure topic in the “Enterprise Server” section in the Infor Web Help.

Create and customize software

To optimize the use of LN, the system administrator can create or customize various software components, for example, menus, forms, and reports.

Perform periodic application runs

Some application programs must run on a regular basis. The system administrator is responsible to run these programs, for example, to update statistics and to print and remove stock transactions.

Maintain the system log

Data about the system and the application is stored in a system log.

The system data includes information about:

  • The application environment
  • Any reorganization of tables
  • The available free disk space
  • The back-up schedule
  • The user data reports
  • The updates
  • Changes in the system
  • The error messages and solutions

Analyze problems

The system administrator must analyze any problems that occur during the usage of LN.

LN offers various logging features that are helpful for problem analysis, such as logging for database locking.

Logging for database locking

LN offers a logging mechanism to gather statistics on database locking. You can use the statistics to identify long waiting times, long locks, and retries, which cause performance problems.

To use this logging mechanism:

  1. To activate the logging, start the Logging Parameters (ttaad4153m000) session and specify this information:
    • A threshold, in milliseconds, for logging database lock actions.
    • A file to store the locking statistics.
    • A time frame in which the logging takes place.
    After you specified the logging parameters, you must convert them to runtime.
  2. To analyze the logging statistics, use the Generate lock graph html output (ttstplocklog ) session. The session first generates a snapshot file, based on the locking log file(s). This file contains all, or a subset of, the log records. Then, the session generates an html report that displays the contents of this snapshot file.

For details, see the online help of the sessions mentioned.