General maintenance tips

If you maintain the system regularly by cleaning up the database and fixing the system errors, your system runs faster. Some of the tips are given in this section.

Examine log files

Your log files tell you very important issues and problems about your system. The level of details logged will be based on the level of logging (INFO, ERROR, and DEBUG).

The log files are named as alfresco.log (current one) or alfresco.log.YYYY-MM-DD (older ones). Examine one of the log files and you will notice the log entries made in the following categories.

  • ERROR: Error occurred (requires FIX)
  • WARN: Warning messages (requires your attention)
  • INFO: General information about the system

The sample messages are given next:

11:20:42,088 WARN [org.hibernate.cache.EhCacheProvider] Could not find configuration [org.jbpm.graph.def.Node]; using defaults.
11:21:45,056 ERROR [org.alfresco.repo.action.ActionServiceImpl] An error was encountered whilst executing the action 'import'.
org.alfresco.service.cmr.view.ImporterException: Failed to import package at line 8; column 19 due to error: A complete repository package cannot be imported here...
15:03:19,308 INFO [org.alfresco.repo.admin.patch.PatchExecuter] No patches were required. .

You have to fix the errors listed in the log file and make sure there are no ERROR messages in the log files. There are many utilities (based on the operating system), which examine the log file for errors and send you notifications as required. Consider using or developing such a tool to be notified as soon as an ERROR occurs.

Reset the administrator password

Administrator has the highest powers in the Alfresco application. It is a good practice to periodically change the administrator password as a security process. You can change the password using the Alfresco Explorer's user profile option.

You also need to make the change in alfresco-virtserver.properties for the new password, as follows:

  1. Modify value for the alfresco.server.password property in the above mentioned file to the new password.
  2. Restart the server.

Providing administrator rights

By default, only the admin user will have administrator rights. You can provide administrator rights to any user using Alfresco Explorer as mentioned next:

  1. Log into Alfresco as admin user.
  2. Navigate to the Administrator Console.
  3. Click on Manage User Groups and click on ALFRESCO_ADMINISTRATORS group.
  4. Click on the More Actions menu and select the Add User option.
  5. Search the users to whom you want to assign administrator rights and click on Add.
  6. You can see those users added in the group as shown in the following screenshot:
    Providing administrator rights

Now these users will also have the Administrator rights and can perform all administrative tasks from Alfresco Explorer.

Reset complete repository data

If you are setting up an environment to test your Alfresco application, you might want to remove or reset the data once the testing is done. There might be other circumstances when you want to remove the existing users, spaces, and rules from the repository, and start fresh. Before deleting or resetting the complete repository, you might want to back it up.

Following is the process to reset the complete repository data:

  1. Stop Alfresco.
  2. Remove the alf_data folder.
  3. Drop the Alfresco database and create an empty Alfresco database.
  4. Start Alfresco.

When you start Alfresco, the alf_data folder will be created and the default database tables will be created automatically.

Migrating servers

The process of migrating an instance of Alfresco running on one server to another server follows a similar pattern to the back-up process, with additional steps of ensuring any configuration is also copied over.

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