LON-CAPA Help
When LON-CAPA is installed a file named loncapa is written to /etc/cron.d.
The frequency and timing of execution of scripts included in this
loncapa crontab file can be modified to suit the needs of your domain.
The scripts, which are all run as the user 'www', are as follows:
- /home/httpd/perl/loncron run daily at 5.10 am updates
the list of servers in the LON-CAPA cluster to which your domain belongs.
All servers in this list should be contactable, and will have the
ability to host user sessions for users in the domain, as well as
being available, if designated as library servers, to return responses
to remote searches for files housed there which have been contributed
to the LON-CAPA content repository. Connections to all servers are
re-evaluated by loncron, in case some machines had become unavailable
within the last 24 hours, and had therefore been flagged as temporarily
offline.
- /home/httpd/perl/checkforupdates.pl run daily at 4.10 am
retrieves checksums/versions for LON-CAPA perl modules and perl script
files for the version of LON-CAPA on your server, from the authoritative
server(s) in the LON-CAPA cluster to which your domain belongs. If
discrepancies are found (version and/or checksum) for installed files,
or if files are missing, or extra (now obsolete) files are present this will
be recorded in a log file, and also sent in an e-mail to recipients specified
for the domain. The availability of a newer release of LON-CAPA on
the install site - http://install.loncapa.org/ - will also be checked,
and notification will be icluded in the e-mail if LON-CAPA should be updated.
- /usr/local/loncapa/bin/CHECKRPMS runs every other day at 3.10
am. This file automates the process of checking for available updates
to LON-CAPA systems. The distprobe script, installed as a part of
LON-CAPA, is used to determine the Linux distribution installed on
the server, which in turn dictates which utility (yum, up2date, you
rug, apt-get or zypper) is called to perform the package check.
- /home/httpd/perl/searchcat.pl run every other day at 1.10 am
traverses the LON-CAPA resource directory in a domain and gathers
metadata which are entered into a SQL database. The script will repopulate
and refresh the metadata database used for the searching the resource
catalog. The script also refreshes and repopulates database tables
used to store metadata for publicly accessible portfolio files, and
user information needed for user searches in a LON-CAPA domain.
- /home/httpd/perl/cleanup_database.pl run daily at 2.13 am
drops tables from the LON-CAPA MySQL database if their comment is
'temporary' and they have not been modified in a given time (default
is 2 days).
- /home/httpd/perl/refresh_courseids_db.pl run daily at 2.50 am
refreshes the database file (stored on a library server) queried when a
fast lookup is needed for information about courses housed on the server.
Course information includes the minimum LON-CAPA version needed to support
the resources and/or settings used in the course.
- /home/httpd/perl/cleanup_file_caches.pl run daily at 1.05
am removes temporary files from the LON-CAPA print spool, the multidownload
zip spool, and userfiles cache.
- /home/httpd/perl/Autoenroll.pl run daily at 1.30 am updates
classlists for any LON-CAPA courses for which auto-enrollment is active,
if enabled in the domain. A conduit needs to have been established
to institutional course roster information.
- /home/httpd/perl/Autoupdate.pl run daily at 3.30 am can reconcile
first name, last name etc. information stored in LON-CAPA with authoritative
data available from an institutional directory. A conduit needs to
have been established to the institutional data source.
- /home/httpd/perl/Autocreate.pl run daily at 2.30 am, checks for requests for creation of official courses, queued pending validation of instructor of record status. Also creates any pending course requests made
using legacy web forms which store XML-based course descriptions in a "pending" directory.