Administration tools connection behavior and requirements

The behavior of admintools when it connects to and performs operations on a database may vary based on your configuration. In particular, admintools considers its connection to other nodes, the status of those nodes, and the authentication method used by dbadmin.

Connection requirements and authentication

• admintools uses passwordless SSH connections between cluster hosts for most operations, which is configured or confirmed during installation with the install_vertica script

• For most situations, when issuing commands to the database, admintools prefers to uses its SSH connection to a target host and uses a localhost client connection to the Vertica database

• The incoming IP address determines the authentication method used. That is, a client connection may have different behavior from a local connection, which may be trusted by default

• dbadmin should have a local trust or password-based authentication method

• When deciding which host to use for multi-step operations, admintools prefers localhost, and then to reconnect to known-to-be-good nodes

K-safety support

The Administration Tools allow certain operations on a K-Safe database, even if some nodes are unresponsive.

The database must have been marked as K-Safe using the MARK_DESIGN_KSAFE function.

The following management functions within the Administration Tools are operational when some nodes are unresponsive.

• View database cluster state

• Connect to database

• Start database (including manual recovery)

• Stop database

• Replace node (assuming node that is down is the one being replaced)

• View database parameters

• Upgrade license key

The following management functions within the Administration Tools require that all nodes be UP in order to be operational:

• Create database

• Run the Database Designer

• Drop database

• Set restart policy

• Roll back database to Last Good Epoch