The tw_remove_darkspace utility enables you to remove any previously-discovered Dark Space DiscoveryAccess nodes from the datastore.

Important This utility should only be used when you initially set the Dark Space Suppression scheme from Keep All to Keep Most Recent or Remove ALL. Otherwise, you should rely on the suppression scheme selected and avoid using this utility entirely. Running tw_remove_darkspace multiple times serves no useful purpose and will take a long time. The time it takes depends entirely on the amount of dark space in your environment and it is not unknown for it to take more than a day to run.

Background

Originally BMC Atrium Discovery kept all nodes, including dark space nodes. This Dark Space Suppression scheme was called Keep All and is now deprecated. The tw_remove_darkspace utility removes these extra nodes immediately; although they would be removed as usual over a period of time during DDD aging.

When an endpoint is discovered and there is no response, it is considered NoResponse. The system traverses back along the complete DiscoveryAccess chain and if it finds any DiscoveryAccess with an associated device then the endpoint is still considered NoResponse. It may be, for example, that the machine is temporarily down. Where no associated device is found, the endpoint is then considered dark space and the subsequent behavior depends on the dark space removal setting. This may be either:

• Keep Most Recent: the system removes all but the current DiscoveryAccess.
• Remove All: the system removes all DiscoveryAccesses.

An effect of DDD aging is that an endpoint, which at one point in time had an associated device, can become a chain of no response DiscoveryAccesses. So, tw_remove_darkspace may find new dark space that it can remove, however, this would have been removed automatically when the endpoint is next scanned.

If an endpoint was associated with an inferred device (Host, MFPart, NetworkDevice, Printer) at any time it remains connected via an AccessFailure until the inferred device is removed, even if that device has changed endpoints.

Usage

Run tw_remove_darkspace while the services are running. Existing discoveries can be running while you execute the utility. When run, the utility stops reasoning, removes dark space, and then restarts reasoning. You might notice a pause in any existing discoveries while the utility runs. The utility outputs the results in the tw_remove_darkspace.log file.

To use the utility, type the following command at the $TIDEWAY/bin/ directory:

tw_remove_darkspace [options] 

where options are either the command described in the following table or the standard, inherited options detailed in Using command line utilities.

User example

In the following example, the utility is run with no options to remove dark space DA nodes from the datastore.

$TIDEWAY/bin/tw_remove_darkspace
Password: system
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WARNING: Dark space removal may take considerable time to complete.
WARNING: Please be patient.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stopping Reasoning processing events
Checking for dark space
Found 113 IPs to check
Checking IPs 0 to 112
113 of which are dark space
Completed removal of dark space DiscoveryAccess nodes
Check for unconnected DiscoveryRunsNo unconnected DiscoveryRuns
Restarting Reasoning processing events
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dark space removal complete.