Failover and Recovery

In the event that VoiceCheck or another component of the Honeywell Voice Maintenance & Inspection Solution becomes unresponsive or shuts down unexpectedly, you may need to initiate data and application recovery procedures. A failover configuration could help prevent periods of system unavailability or data loss.

Recovery Steps with no Automated Failover

If VoiceCheck becomes unresponsive, stop and restart the VoiceCheck service (or the Apache Tomcat server, also listed in services).

If this is unsuccessful, shut down and restart the machine hosting the server and verify that the VoiceCheck service successfully started. You should also verify that the database is up and available.

If your VoiceCheck database service goes down or requires a restart, you must also stop the VoiceCheck application service. Start the application service again only after the database is fully up and running.

Preventative Steps 

Backing Up, Restoring, and Maintaining the Database

VoiceCheck does not come with any built-in ability to back up the database. Honeywell strongly recommends that you schedule regular database backups. If a disaster occurs in which the database is corrupted or no longer available, restore a previous backup to use.

If regular backups are not performed, the transaction log file will continue to grow and may eventually cause application problems.

Connecting VoiceCheck to a Different Database

If you need to bring up a redundant database, ensure that all database information for the redundant database is the same as the original database. Then, perform the following steps to associate VoiceCheck with the new database.

1. On the server machine go to <TOMCAT HOME>\webapps\VoiceCheck\classes.
2. Open the file database.properties using a text editor.
3. Update the URL information in the following properties with the new host name of the redundant database.

   hibernate.connection.url 
   hibernate.connection.username
   hibernate.connection.password
   archive.hibernate.connection.url
   archive.hibernate.connection.username
   archive.hibernate.connection.password

4. Save the file.
5. Restart Apache Tomcat server.

The archive properties are not currently used, but you should update the URL information to maintain consistency.

The current passwords will be encrypted. Simply type the new passwords in plain text, and they will automatically be encrypted when the Tomcat server and VoiceCheck are restarted.

Using a Secondary VoiceConsole Server

If your production VoiceConsole server becomes unavailable, you might have to switch temporarily to use a secondary or development implementation of VoiceConsole until the production machine is restored. As with VoiceCheck, create a failover configuration for VoiceConsole. Install an instance of the VoiceConsole server on multiple machines that communicate with the same database. See the VoiceConsole Implementation Guide for more information.

In any scenario where a new VoiceConsole server is brought online, you have to load a new configuration file (device profile) to each Talkman A730x device so it can connect and communicate with a different instance of VoiceConsole. To deploy new configurations, load it on a single device via USB cable, then use TouchConfig to deploy the configuration to the rest of the devices. See VoiceConsole Online Help for information on loading profile through a cable.

Reporting a Disaster

Be sure to report any incidents where your Honeywell Voice Maintenance & Inspection Solution application becomes unresponsive or shuts down unexpectedly. Send your logs to Honeywell. Retrieve them from the user interface on the Administration > Logs page, and by default, the log files are stored in the following directory:

• <InstallationDirectory>\logs