1 OVERVIEW =TITLE Overview of DECwindows Banner DECwindows Version 2.0 Banner Copyright 1990 All rights reserved Author: Jim Saunders Based on VWS Banner program by Peter Goerge, and CW Hobbs. The DECwindows Banner displays information about the current state of the VMS host it is running on. It also includes other features, such as the Clock, Alarm facility, and Message Window facility. You can interact, and customize DECwindows Banner by using the pop-up menu. To display the pop-up menu, move the pointer anywhere in any of the Banner displays. Press and hold the MB2 button. Choose the desired option on the menu and release the MB2 button. For information on using help, choose Help from the Help menu above. For addition information about using Banner, double click on an item from the list of additional topics. 2 SETUP_OPTIONS =TITLE Setup Options The Setup Options allows you to customize the displays of Banner. You can choose to have as many Banner displays active as you wish. Disabling a particular class of Banner, will result in the window for this display no longer being visible. The following classes of display are available. o Cpu Display A Histogram, and optionally a Bar Graph ( Modes Display) of the current Cpu activity. The histogram can be set to show each Active CPU via the 'Multiple CPUs' option in the setup menu. o Monitor Display Statistics on various memory and disk resources. o System Display Statistics on various System characteristics. o Links Display Show the current active NCP links on your machine. o Locks Display Statistics on various Locks. o Process Display A display of the Top Cpu users. (User Name, Process Name, Pid) A display of processes states. o Message Display A display of Messages 'BroadCasted', to your workstation. o Clock Display A digital and/or analog clock. o Transaction processing Display A histogram display, showing transaction processing statistics. o Print Queue Display A display that shows the status of the current print queues, and print jobs on the system. o Batch Queue display A display that shows the current status of batch queues, and batch jobs on the system. o Toy Display An Active toy :- Rotating Box Rotating World Hanoi 3 UPDATE_TIMER =TITLE Update Timer Scale The update Timer scale controls the interval that banner updates all the windows concerned with the VMS statistics. It does not affect the Clock, Toy, or Message windows. To change the Interval period, Place the pointer, over the arrow in the scale. Push MB1, and pull the pointer, to the left or right, until the desired value is displayed. Refer to the section on DECW$BANNER_node.DAT for additional information on setting individual window intervals. NOTE: The shorter the interval, the more demand Banner will place on the DECwindows Server to update the display. This will indirectly increase the resource demand Banner places on the machine. 3 BASE_PRIORITY =TITLE Banner Base Priority The Base Priority scale, defines the VMS priority that banner will run at. This value will be totally ignored if you have selected either the Rotating Box, or Hanoi as Banner Toys, and in this case banner will run at Priority 0. 3 DEVICE_NAMES =TITLE Banner Device Names The Monitor window can contain statics on 3 DISK devices of your choice. The Device Name fields, allow you to specify the Devices, and they name to be displayed in the window, for these 3 devices. If a particular device you have chosen does not exist, Banner will place *'s in the statics for this device. There are three types of device names you may use. 1) Single Device names example:- DUA0: 2) Compound Device names example:- DUA0:,DUA1:,DUA2: In this case a comma separated list of of device names. Banner will monitor each one of the devices, and display composite statistics for them. 3) Sequential Device name example:- DUA%d:3 or DUA%d:3,MUA%d:4,SYS$SYSDEVICE: In this the device format is DEV%d:n where 'DEV' is the prefix of the device's you wish to monitor. '%d' is a directive to insert a numeric value, (Note it is case sensitive), and ':n' is the number of device you wish to monitor. For instance DUA%d:3, will monitor DUA0:, DUA1:, DUA2:. All three types of device specification may be intermixed in a comma separated list. 3 MONITOR_DISPLAY =TITLE Banner Monitor Display You may choose to have the following items display in the monitor display. o Disk 0 statistics o Disk 1 statistics o Disk 2 statistics o Paging IO statistics o Remote IO statistics o SYS fault statistics o Page fault statistics o Modified Page statistics o Free Page statistics You may choose to include or exclude any of the above. The above options will be 'grayed' if you have not chosen to have a monitor or system display. 3 SYSTEM_DISPLAY =TITLE Banner System Display You may choose to have the following items display in the system display. In some cases a display line is used for two sets of statistics, this depends on the options chosen in the setup menu. o Disk 0 statistics o Disk 1 statistics o Disk 2 statistics The Allocated disk space statistics is display in the upper half of the display, while the IO rate is displayed in the lower half. o Memory statistics The utilization of physical memory is displayed in the upper half of the display, while the modified page list is displayed in the lower half. o CPU utilization o Page fault statistics Page file Utilization in upper half, Page fault rate in lower half. o Page/Remote IO statistics Direct page IO in the upper half, and Remote IO in the lower half. You may choose to include or exclude any of the above. The above options will be 'grayed' if you have not chosen to have a monitor or system display. Look at the help on DECW$DEFAULTS_node.DAT to see how to customize the High Water Marks, Colour, and Reset Timers. 3 OTHER_FEATURES =TITLE Other Setup features From the SETUP display you may choose the following additional features. o Display Seconds Control the display of seconds in the clock window. o Display Border Indicates if a title bar should exist on banner windows or not. NOTE: If not title bar exists you will not be able to, iconize, resize, or 'push behind' banner windows. You can reposition Banner windows when there is no title bar, by depressing MB3 and pulling the window to the desired position. Pressing another button while MB3 is depressed will cancel the operation. o Active Icons Indicates if each banner window can be inconized individually, or if all banner windows will iconize together. The message window is not effected by this flag. o Bell Active Banner can ring the bell when it receives a new message, or an alarm expires. This flag controls this activity. 3 XDEFAULTS =TITLE DECW$BANNER_node.DAT defaults files. Banner posses a defaults file named DECW$BANNER.DAT, which resides in DECW$SYSTEM_DEFAULTS:. If you utilize the Save settings options, Banner will create a copy of this file, in DECW$USER_DEFAULTS, containing your specific customizations. The file name is of the form DECW$BANNER_node.DAT where 'node' refers to the node name on which banner is running. The following resources are available in this file, that do not exist in the setup menu. DECW$BANNER_node.font_template Control the font, that banner uses for all text display. DECW$BANNER_node*foreground Control the foreground colour banner uses. DECW$BANNER_node*background Control the background colour banner uses. DECW$BANNER_node.highlight_colour Control the highlight colour banner uses. DECW$BANNER_node.sys_highlight Control the percent utilization, where Banner will highlight the display if a display exceeds this percentage. DECW$BANNER_node.hwmrk_update Where High Water Marks are display, Banner will reset the marks after this number of seconds. DECW$BANNER_node.sys_ioratemax DECW$BANNER_node.sys_faultratemax Control what banner considers max values per second for calculating IO/Fault rate displays. DECW$BANNER_node.sysrespgfile If 1 Banner will add the amount of reservable page file, to the amount actually allocated, when display page file utilization. DECW$BANNER_node.bell_volume Controls the volume of the Bell. DECW$BANNER_node.process_update DECW$BANNER_node.monitor_update DECW$BANNER_node.pe_update DECW$BANNER_node.lck_update DECW$BANNER_node.sys_update DECW$BANNER_node.cwps_update DECW$BANNER_node.tp_update DECW$BANNER_node.qb_update DECW$BANNER_node.qp_update Control the individual update times for each of the windows. If any are set to 0 they will default to that of banner.cpu_update; DECW$BANNER_node.message_hide_timer Controls the time the message window will stay displayed before it automaticly dismissed itself. Default period is 1 minute. All other resources can be set using the Save Settings option, and the Setup options. DECW$BANNER_node.node_display_name An optional string, which when specified will be displayed as a replacement for the node name in the Banner display. Note: On many display the maximum field length for this area is 11 characters. 3 MESSAGE_DISPLAY =TITLE Message Display Window The Message display window, displays any 'BroadCasted' messages received on your workstation. Banner can be executing on any node and still catch messages. You may use the scroll Bar to review previous messages when they are no longer visible in the display. The message display window will automaticly dismiss itself after 1 minute. Refer to the DECW$BANNER_node.DAT file to customise this functionality. 4 DISMISS =TITLE Dismiss Button It is suggested that you never Iconize the Message window. Instead utilize the Hide Button, which will make the Message Window 'Vanish' from the display. The message window will automatically reappear when a new message is received. 4 ERASE =TITLE Erase Button The Erase Button will clear the Message Window, and all history of previous messages. 3 OK =TITLE OK Button Click on the OK Button if you wish to use the setting you have established. 3 CANCEL =TITLE Cancel Button Click on the Cancel Button if you do not wish to use the settings you have established. 2 SOUND_OPTIONS =TITLE Sound Options On work stations which have sound support, Banner allows for varous events to generate use defined sounds. This option is only available if you workstation support sound generation. There are a number of events which can be enabled for sound support, and each event can have a use specified sound attached to it. For sound support to be available for each of the events, the Banner window which displays the specific data must be active. These are currently the Process Display, and the System Display. The volume, and duration of the sound can be customized using this setup option as well. Events available are :- Processes in MWAIT Process Creation Process Deletion Disk 1 Allocation High Disk 2 Allocation High Disk 3 Allocation High Memory Allocation High Page file Allocation High IO's outstanding on Eithernet 2 ALARM_SETUP =TITLE Alarm Setup The Alarm Setup option allows you to set times when Banner should give you an alarm message. You may set as many alarms as you wish, and multiple alarms for the same time if necessary. Use the Scales to set the hour, and minute for the alarm. Enter the text to be displayed in the alarm, in the alarm text area. To set the alarm press MB1 in the OK button. To cancel the alarm press MB1 in the Cancel button. If you have a clock window active, an Alarm Icon will appear in this window, when an Alarm is set. 2 SHOW_MESSAGE_WINDOW =TITLE Show Message Window This option will force the Message Window to reappear, if it has been Hidden. 2 GOTO_MINIMUM_DISPLAY =TITLE Goto Minimum Display This option is helpful if you have choisen to have Banner without borders. Selecting this option will shrink Banner to one window, approximatly 20 chars wide by 3 lines high. This may be useful if Banner windows are hiding a portion of the screen you need access to. To reverse this operation select the Restore Saved Settings option, and Banner will be reset to your saved settings. 2 RESTORE_SAVED_SETTINGS =TITLE Restore Saved Settings This Option will reset Banner to the saved settings established the last time you used the Save Settings option. 2 RESTORE_DEFAULTS =TITLE Restore Defaults Settings This Option will reset Banner to its initial uncostomized state. 2 SAVE_CURRENT =TITLE Save Current This option will save the current setup options. It will also save the window sizes, and X,Y coordinates for each Banner window. 2 HIGHLIGHTS =TITLE Display HighLight If you are running Banner on a color work station, varous events may cause the information in the banner displays to be highlighted. Highlighting is used in the following display, and for the following reasons. The color used for highlighting can be modified by customizing the DECW$BANNER_node.DAT. o Process Display o Cpu Display Highlighting is used in the process display for marking changes from the last display cycle. The histogram's will highlight once the '.sys_highlight' percentage is exceeded by any one line. o System Display Highlighting in the system display is the same as for the other two displays except for the following additons. 1) Disk names will be highlighted if banner fails to gain statistics for and one particular disk contained in this display line, and/or if any one of those disks in that line has a current Error Count > 0. 2) The node name will be highlighted if there is an outstanding eithernet status code. The status codes are displayed at the same time to the right of the node name. 'P' - Pending IO's are outstanding to a disk which is mounted on a remote system in the cluster. 'M' - A remote disk in the cluster has gone mount verify. 'S' - The System disk has gone mount Verify. More than one of the above codes may be displayed at the same time. o Queue Displays Lines in the queue display are highlighted if the queue concerned is in a state such as Stopped or Paused. All jobs displayed on that queue will be highlighted as well. 2 EXIT =TITLE Exit This option Terminates DECwindows Banner.