Manually running a BOSH errand for Pivotal Cloud Foundry on GCP

Pivotal Ops Manager has various errands in runs for different deployments within a PCF instance. These Errands can be switched off manually when installing new Tiles or upgrading the platform, in fact in PCF 1.10 the errands themselves will only run if they need to run making it a lot faster.

Below I am going to show you how you would manually run an Errand if you needed to on a PCF instance running on GCP. These instructions would work for PCF running on AWS, Azure or even vSphere so there not specific to PCF on GCP.

1. First login to your Ops Manager VM itself

pasapicella@pas-macbook:~/pivotal/GCP/install/10/opsmanager$ ./ssh-opsman.sh
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-66-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

  System information as of Mon Apr  3 23:38:57 UTC 2017

  System load:  0.0                Processes:           141
  Usage of /:   14.7% of 78.71GB   Users logged in:     0
  Memory usage: 68%                IP address for eth0: 0.0.0.0
  Swap usage:   0%

  Graph this data and manage this system at:
    https://landscape.canonical.com/

  Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
    http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

5 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

Your Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) is supported until April 2019.

*** System restart required ***
Last login: Mon Apr  3 23:38:59 2017 from 110.175.56.52
ubuntu@om-pcf-110:~$

2. Target the Bosh director which would look like this

ubuntu@om-pcf-110:~$ bosh --ca-cert /var/tempest/workspaces/default/root_ca_certificate target 10.0.0.10
Target set to 'p-bosh'

Note: You may be asked to login if you have not logged in to the bosh director which you can determine the login details from Ops Manager UI as follows

- Log into Ops Manager UI
- Click on the tile for the the the "Ops Manager Director" which would be specific to your IaaS provider, in the example below that is GCP

- Click on the credentials tab

3. Target the correct deployment. In the example below I am targeting the Elastic Runtime deployment.

ubuntu@om-pcf-110:~$ bosh deployment /var/tempest/workspaces/default/deployments/cf-c099637fab39369d6ba0.yml
Deployment set to '/var/tempest/workspaces/default/deployments/cf-c099637fab39369d6ba0.yml'

Note: You can list out the deployment names using "bosh deployments"

4. List out the errands as shown below using "bosh errands"

ubuntu@om-pcf-110:~$ bosh errands
RSA 1024 bit CA certificates are loaded due to old openssl compatibility

+-----------------------------+
| Name                        |
+-----------------------------+
| smoke-tests                 |
| push-apps-manager           |
| notifications               |
| notifications-ui            |
| push-pivotal-account        |
| autoscaling                 |
| autoscaling-register-broker |
| nfsbrokerpush               |
| bootstrap                   |
| mysql-rejoin-unsafe         |
+-----------------------------+

5. Now in this example we are going to run the errand "push-apps-manager" and we do it as shown below

$ bosh run errand push-apps-manager

** Output **

ubuntu@om-pcf-110:~$ bosh run errand push-apps-manager
Acting as user 'director' on deployment 'cf-c099637fab39369d6ba0' on 'p-bosh'
RSA 1024 bit CA certificates are loaded due to old openssl compatibility

Director task 621
  Started preparing deployment > Preparing deployment

  Started preparing package compilation > Finding packages to compile. Done (00:00:01)

     Done preparing deployment > Preparing deployment (00:00:05)

  Started creating missing vms > push-apps-manager/32218933-7511-4c0d-b512-731ca69c4254 (0)

...

+ '[' '!' -z 'Invitations deploy log: ' ']'
+ printf '** Invitations deploy log:  \n'
+ printf '*************************************************************************************************\n'
+ cat /var/vcap/packages/invitations/invitations.log

Errand 'push-apps-manager' completed successfully (exit code 0)
ubuntu@om-pcf-110:~$