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Administering
In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
System administration
These topics contain concepts, procedures, and reference information for database and database server administrators to use for managing and tuning HCL Informix® database servers.
Administrator's Reference
The Informix® Administrator's Reference includes comprehensive descriptions of HCL Informix configuration parameters, the system-monitoring interface (SMI) tables in the sysmaster database, the syntax of database server utilities such as onmode and onstat, logical-log records, disk structures, event alarms, and unnumbered error messages.
Administrative Utilities
The onpassword utility
Use the onpassword utility to encrypt and decrypt a password file. Connection Manager and Enterprise Replication utilities require a password file to connect to database servers over an untrusted network.

Administering
In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
- System administration
  These topics contain concepts, procedures, and reference information for database and database server administrators to use for managing and tuning HCL Informix® database servers.
  - List of utilities
    HCL Informix® includes utilities and applications that you can use to perform administrative tasks and capture information about configuration and performance.
  - Administrator's Guide
    The Informix® Administrator's Guide provides the information required to administer HCL Informix.
  - Administrator's Reference
    The Informix® Administrator's Reference includes comprehensive descriptions of HCL Informix configuration parameters, the system-monitoring interface (SMI) tables in the sysmaster database, the syntax of database server utilities such as onmode and onstat, logical-log records, disk structures, event alarms, and unnumbered error messages.
    - Configuring and monitoring Informix®
    - Administrative Utilities
      - Overview of Utilities
        The Informix® database server utilities allow you to perform administrative tasks directly from the command line.
      - The finderr utility
        Use the finderr utility to view additional information on Informix® error messages. On UNIX™ and Linux™ platforms, the information appears on the command line. On Windows™ platforms, the information appears in the Error Messages program.
      - The genoncfg Utility
        Use the genoncfg utility to expedite the process of customizing the default Informix® configuration file (onconfig.std) to the host environment and your planned usage of a database server instance.
      - The oncheck Utility
        Use the oncheck utility to check specified disk structures for inconsistencies, repair inconsistent index structures, and display information about disk structures.
      - The onclean utility
        Use the onclean utility to force a shut down of the database server when normal shut down with the onmode utility fails or when you cannot restart the server. The onclean utility attempts to clean up shared memory, semaphores, and stops database server virtual processes.
      - The oncmsm utility
        Use the oncmsm utility to start or shut down a Connection Manager, load a new configuration file into a Connection Manager to modify the Connection Manager's settings, or update the format of a configuration file.
      - The onconfig_diff utility
        Use the onconfig_diff utility to compare two onconfig files.
      - The ondblog utility
        Use the ondblog utility to change the logging mode for one or more databases.
      - The oninit utility
        The oninit utility starts the database server.
      - The onkstash Utility
        Use the onkstash utility to create a password stash file for an existing PKCS#12 keystore.
      - The onkstore Utility
      - The onlog utility
        The onlog utility displays the contents of a logical-log file, either on disk or on backup.
      - The onmode utility
        Use the onmode utility to change the database server operating mode and perform various other operations on shared memory, sessions, transactions, parameters, and segments.
      - The onparams Utility
        Use the onparams utility to add or drop a logical-log file, change physical-log parameters, and add a new buffer pool.
      - The onpassword utility
        Use the onpassword utility to encrypt and decrypt a password file. Connection Manager and Enterprise Replication utilities require a password file to connect to database servers over an untrusted network.
      - The ifxclone utility
        You use the ifxclone utility to create a server clone from a snapshot of an existing database server.
      - The onspaces utility
        Use the onspaces utility to manage the storage spaces in your database.
      - The onstat utility
        The onstat utility reads shared-memory structures and provides statistics about the database server at the time that the command runs.
    - SQL Administration API
    - Appendixes
  - DB-Access User's Guide
    The Informix® DB-Access User's Guide describes how to use the DB-Access utility to access, modify, and retrieve information from Informix database servers.
  - High-Performance Loader User's Guide
    The describes how to use the HCL Informix® to load and unload large quantities of data efficiently to or from Informix databases.
  - Performance Guide
    The Informix® Performance Guide describes how to configure and operate your HCL Informix database server to improve overall system throughput and to improve the performance of SQL queries.
  - SNMP Subagent Guide
    The describes the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the software that you need to use SNMP to monitor and manage HCL Informix® database servers and databases.
  - InformixHQ Guide
    InformixHQ is a modern web console for visualizing, monitoring, and managing your Informix server instances. It is purpose built for ease-of-use, scaling out, and optimizing DevOps needs. It provides critical performance management capabilities, monitoring how key performance metrics are changing over time and tracking how efficiently Informix is running your workload even when you’ve stepped away from your screen. Its monitoring system feeds directly into a customizable alerting system so you can be immediately alerted via email, Twilio, or PagerDuty whenever an issue occurs on one of your Informix database server instances. InformixHQ is designed to be scalable to efficiently manage and monitor as many Informix database server instances as you need. Moreover, it's a tool that can be shared by the DBAs, the app developers, the ops engineers, and management and accessed from any desktop, laptop, or mobile device. InformixHQ is the centralized hub for graphical monitoring, alerting, and administration of your Informix database servers.
- Backup and Restore Guide
  The Informix® Backup and Restore Guide describes how to use the Informix ON-Bar and ontape utilities to back up and restore database server data. These utilities enable you to recover your databases after data is lost or becomes corrupted due to hardware or software failure or accident.
- Enterprise Replication
  The HCL® Informix® Enterprise Replication Guide describes the concepts of data replication using Informix Enterprise Replication, including how to design your replication system, as well as administer and manage data replication throughout your enterprise.

The onpassword utility

Use the onpassword utility to encrypt and decrypt a password file. Connection Manager and Enterprise Replication utilities require a password file to connect to database servers over an untrusted network.

Syntax


Element	Purpose	Key Considerations
-k	Specifies the password key.
-e	Encrypts an ASCII text file	The password information is encrypted to $INFORMIXDIR/etc/passwd_file
-d	Decrypts the specified encrypted password file.	The passwd_file is decrypted to `$INFORMIXDIR/etc/output_file_name`.
`output_file_name`	The name of the file that is output by the decryption process.	An encrypted password file that is created on one type of platform is not supported on a different type of platform. You must run the onpassword utility on each type of platform, and use the same text file and encryption key.
`encryption_key`	The encryption key used to encrypt and decrypt password information.	The encryption key can be any sequence of numbers or letters up to 24 bytes in length. To use an encryption key that includes spaces, enclose the encryption key in quotation marks. For example: `"my secret encryption key"`
`text_file`	The ASCII text file that contains user password information.	The onpassword utility uses the following default location: UNIX™: $INFORMIXDIR/tmp Windows™: %INFORMIXDIR%\etc

Usage

Only users logged in as user informix have permission to run the onpassword utility.

Example 1: Encrypting a password file

To encrypt tmp/my_passwords.txt with my_secret_encryption_key, run the following command:

onpassword -k my_secret_encryption_key -e my_passwords.txt

The password information is encrypted into $INFORMIXDIR/etc/passwd_file.

Example 2: Decrypting an encrypted password file

To decrypt $INFORMIXDIR/etc/passwd_file with my_secret_encryption_key, run the following command:

onpassword -k my_secret_encryption_key -d my_passwords.txt

The password information is decrypted to $INFORMIXDIR/etc/my_passwords.txt.