Preparing for Power Scripts Suite 7.x

Owned by Radu Dumitriu (Deactivated)
Last updated: Oct 15, 2024
3 min read

 

Power Scripts 7.x was a huge effort adding more security and aiming to streamline operations and monitoring for those of you who run Jira in a cluster.

Java Version was increased to Java 17

What changed?

Binaries from version 7.x are incompatible with binaries from previous versions (6.x). Java 17 was used in development for Power Scripts 7.0.x, but keeping sources and generated bytecode to the Java 11 level.

What should you do to be prepared?

Check your Java version that is used to run Jira.

It is recommended to run Power Scripts Suite products with Java17. Java 11 will continue to be supported for Jira 9, however, Jira 10.0.0 uses by default Java17.

Security: system routines are disabled by default

What changed?

The system() routines serve as a valuable mechanism for integration at the operating system level. Unfortunately, this valuable mechanism for integration can also lead for the potential of misuse.

For security purposes, these routines are disabled by default in version 7.0. To enable them, you must activate them at the OS level.

What should you do to be prepared?

  1. Check your scripts to see if any of them use the system() function (routine).

  2. Decide if continuing to use the system() function is an acceptable risk for your organization.

  3. If you plan to continue using the system function, follow the steps below to enable it.

Next Steps

System routines are controlled now by a sil.system.enabled property you will need to add in the Java command line. We suggest you do that in the classic setenv.sh / setenv.bat of the container.

sil.system.enabled is a boolean property, and takes true or false (default) as values. You will need to add In one of the variables of the startup, for instance JVM_REQUIRED_ARGS:

-Dsil.system.enabled=true

The Jira cluster will need to be rebooted in order for these changes to take effect.

Clustering: kepler home follows silprograms

What changed?

The directory named 'kepler' follows now the silprograms home. It will be created at the same level as silprograms (sil.home).

What should you do to be prepared?

If you followed our naming conventions, this should have no impact. However if you previously symlinked your kepler directory or if you change silprograms directory during the Jira clusterization, you may need to address this as well.

Next Steps

  1. When first installing Power Scripts in cluster: both ‘kepler' and 'silprograms’ should be created in the shared home directory

  2. If you are creating the cluster from an existing node, you will need to copy both ‘kepler' & 'silprograms’ directories in the shared home of your Jira. Make sure the owner of those directories remain the same. If you used in your scripts absolute paths you may want to symlink the original directories to the shared home (but be prepared to use sil.allowed.dirs to deal with potential access problems. See File Manipulation Routines for details).

Clustering: reports from all active nodes

What changed?

Managing a cluster is a bit more complicated than a single server. We added reports from all active nodes in certain runtime screens (SQL Monitoring & Queued tasks). They use, temporarily, the ‘kepler/cluster’ directory in order to coordinate the reporting.

What should you do to be prepared?

Clustering: SIL Manager will need fewer refreshes

What changed?

Previously, while the runtime picked up immediately the changes, in SIL Manager you had to refresh manually if anything would happen on some other nodes, like file creation, deletion, etc. We now notify the nodes to refresh automatically.

What should you do to be prepared?

No steps are necessary to be prepared for this change. Just know what to expect.