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Monthly Checklist
When running MD Link in production, you can prevent certain problems if you follow the steps below regularly. Once a month is ideal, but even once a year will catch many problems before they disrupt your operations. This page amounts to a list of best practices for managing an MD Link installation in production.
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Check the expiration date of TLS certificates
If you have no interfaces which use HTTPS (AKA HTTP over SSL/TLS), then ignore this point. If you find that you do have such an interface, it uses a self-signed certificate, and the expiration date of that certificate passes, then the message flow of that interface will stop until you install the new certificate. MD Link doesn't have any alert features that will warn you about certificate expiration.
To manually check certificate expiration for an HTTP POST Task:- In the Studio, select the task > Properties tab > Use HTTPS "Options..." button.
- For both "Key Store" and "Trust Store":
- If the "store" is set to "Embed in this solution file", then:
- If the "store" is set to "Use external file", then:
Check free hard drive space
- Check this for both MD Link's "Data Folder" drive and the Windows system drive.
Check the expiration date of the service account's password
If your MD Link service is set up to "Log on" as a certain account, that account has an expiring password, and the expiration date passes, then the MD Link service will go down at a time outside of your control.
To check the password expiration date:
- Go to the Start menu > Services > MD Link [version] > right-click > Properties > "Log on" tab.
- If the account shown here is "Local System":
- There is no need to check this, because the Local System password never expires.
- Otherwise:
- Note the username under "This account". Say for example that it is "domain1\serviceuser1".
- Open any Command Prompt, paste this command, substitute your own values, then run the command: net user serviceuser1 /DOMAIN
- Note that we did not specify "domain1" on the command line. Only "serviceuser1".
- If your service user is not a domain account (that is, it does not start with a "domain1\" part) then remove the "/DOMAIN" argument.
- In the output of the command, look for the line "Password expires". If it expires soon, then:
- Change the password of serviceuser1.
- Enter the new password into the MD Link service's Properties > "Log on" tab.
- Restart the MD Link service.
Test the Alert Email Credentials
Sometimes alert emails will fail to send due to a change on the mail server such as a change of password or TLS configuration. If this happens, you won't be notified, because MD Link can't alert you via email (by definition), and the logs for these failures are easy to miss.
- Test sending an email from the Studio:
- Open the Studio, open any solution of yours that has alert emails configured, go to the Edit menu > Properties, and click the "Send Test E-mail" button.
- Test sending an email from the Service:
- This is worth testing separately from the Studio, because in rare cases an email will send successfully from the Studio but not from the Service.
- Open the Studio, open any solution of yours that has alert emails configured, save a copy of it as emailtest.xcs, delete all of the events and tasks, create a new Custom Task, select it, select the Alerts tab, enable the "Time passed without executing" checkbox, set the Warning threshold to 1 second, and select the checkbox in the "Send Alert E-mail" row and the "Warning" column.
- From the MD Link Monitor, load emailtest.xcs in the service.
- Check the logs for emailtest.xcs and verify that the Service sent an alert email.
- Verify that your received that alert email in your inbox.