Conman commands processing

The conman program performs the commands that change the status of objects, such as start or stop for a workstation, and the commands that modify objects in the plan in an asynchronous way. This means that you might notice a delay between the time you submit the command and the time the information stored in the Symphony file is updated with the result of the command.

This occurs because the conman program does not update the information stored in the Symphony file; conman submits the commands to batchman which is the only process which can access and update the information contained in the Symphony file. For this reason you need to wait for batchman to process the request of modifying the object issued by conman and then to update the information about the object stored in the Symphony file before seeing the updated information in the output of the showobj command.

Any changes made using the conman program that affect the Symphony file are also applied to the replicated plan information in the database.

For example, if you request to delete a dependency using the conman deldep command, conman submits the deldep command by posting an event in the Mailman.msg mailbox. The mailman process gets the information about the deletion request from Mailman.msg and puts it in the Intercom.msg mailbox on the workstation that owns the resource you delete the dependency from. On each workstation, batchman receives the events in its Intercom.msg mailbox and processes them in the same order as they were received. If batchman is busy for any reason, events carrying requests to perform conman commands continue being queued in the Intercom.msg file waiting to be read and processed by batchman.

In addition, when batchman processes the event, the operator is not notified. As a result, you could delete a dependency and it might appear that it had not been deleted because batchman was too busy to immediately perform the requested operation. If you run the command again, the deletion might have already been successful, even though a message saying that the command has been successfully forwarded to batchman is displayed in the conman prompt.