23. December 2017

How to start all SAP services on openSUSE

The default installation of SAP Netweaver AS ABAP Developer Edition on openSUSE might not start all services after a reboot.

An indication of the problem: port 3300 is not open. After an attempt to connect from SAP Logon you’ll get following error:

WSAECONNREFUSED: Connection refused

When you logon to the system with SAP you may see that some of SAP processes are running, but not all of them:

root      1471  0.0  0.1 172524 10772 ?        Sl   09:01   0:00 /usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/saphostexec pf=/usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/host_profile
sapadm    1521  0.0  0.0  36892  4700 ?        Ss   09:01   0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --user
sapadm    1526  0.0  0.0  86200  1716 ?        S    09:01   0:00 (sd-pam)
sapadm    1536  0.1  0.3 348208 32260 ?        Ssl  09:01   0:00 /usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/sapstartsrv pf=/usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/host_profile -D
root      1625  0.0  0.0  25568  5316 ?        Ss   09:01   0:00 /usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/saposcol -l -w60 pf=/usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/host_profile
npladm    1889  0.2  1.1 661916 92220 ?        Ssl  09:01   0:00 /usr/sap/NPL/D00/exe/sapstartsrv pf=/usr/sap/NPL/SYS/profile/NPL_D00_georgik -D -u npladm
npladm    2069  0.0  1.1 661304 89420 ?        Ssl  09:01   0:00 /usr/sap/NPL/ASCS01/exe/sapstartsrv pf=/usr/sap/NPL/SYS/profile/NPL_ASCS01_georgik -D -u npladm

As you can see there are two system accounts running on the system: sapadm, npladm. NPL is in my case System ID. The start command should be executed under npladm identity.

Launch following command as root of the system (change npladm to you own System ID):

su -c "startsap all" -l npladm

The system will start with following messages displayed in the console:

Checking syb Database
-------------------------------------------
starting database NPL ...
Log file: /sybase/NPL/startdb.log
parse level 0: identified message 'Database 'master' is now online.'
parse level 1: identified message 'Database 'tempdb' is now online.'
parse level 2: identified message 'Database 'sybsystemprocs' is now online.'
parse level 3: identified message 'Recovery complete.'
Recovery Complete
startdb completed successfully
Starting Startup Agent sapstartsrv
OK
Instance Service on host georgik started
-------------------------------------------
starting SAP Instance ASCS01
Startup-Log is written to /home/npladm/startsap_ASCS01.log
-------------------------------------------
/usr/sap/NPL/ASCS01/exe/sapcontrol -prot NI_HTTP -nr 01 -function Start
Instance on host rihy started
Starting Startup Agent sapstartsrv
OK
Instance Service on host rihy started
-------------------------------------------
starting SAP Instance D00
Startup-Log is written to /home/npladm/startsap_D00.log
-------------------------------------------
/usr/sap/NPL/D00/exe/sapcontrol -prot NI_HTTP -nr 00 -function Start
Instance on host georgik started

You can check whether port 3300 is open:

netstat -anp | grep 3300
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3300            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      20212/gwrd

You should be able logon to the SAP on openSUSE without a problem.

If you’re still not able to access the machine from remote then it’s necessary to check the firewall configuration. openSUSE has a strict firewall when using default installation.

You can change firewall configuration by the command:

yast2 firewall

27. November 2016

Controlling relay connected to ESP8266 via MQTT from Android

After successful implementation of MQTT into Lamp Relay with ESP8266 there was one remaining challenge. Communication of Android Lamp App with ESP8266 via MQTT. It was little bit harder than I expected, because examples were not very clear.

Sending commands to MQTT broker was relatively easy. There was just a catch. It is necessary to declare the MQTT service in AndroidManifest.xml:

<service android:name="org.eclipse.paho.android.service.MqttService">
</service>

Thanks to tutorial from HiveMQ I was able to send messages to MQTT broker.

The problem was the opposite direction. How to receive messages?

Well, there is support in the same MQTT library for topic subscriptions. The issue is that incoming message is being processed on background thread and it’s not possible to update UI. It took me some time to realize the source of problem. I was hunting ghosts. I thought that there is some problem in ImageButton or TobbleButton.

Correct solution was to move communication to Android service class. Then bind the service so UI can send commands to the service and the last part was to add broadcast receiver to pass message from service to UI.

Here is small schema which describes delivery of message from broker to app.

mqtt-broker-to-android

It was necessary to make also small update in ESP8266 in order to tell Mosquitto to persist the state of a lamp (the last bool parameter):

mqttClient.publish(topicName("relay"), "off", true);

The result is nice. I can turn on the lamp via web interface and all connected Android apps are updated and user can see the state of the lamp.

lamp-app-mqtt

The code for Android app is available at Github – LampApp. Previous code with REST API was moved to branch v0.1. The code for ESP8266 module is also at Github – LampESP. Feel free to customize the app. You can find instructions in README.md.

I see the next challenge for LampApp: display lamp control widget at lock screen. Maybe I’ll be more successful than the last time.