Overview

PACE has a variety of products with a particular focus on IT Financial Management. The product that concerns this study is named KOMAND. KOMAND is an accounting and charge back software that runs on Unix servers.

Challenge

KOMAND is primarily written for the System V release 4(SVR4) branch of Unix Systems which was promoted by AT&T and is among the widely used Unix systems in the world for the last 25 years.Linux has become a force to reckon with in the recent years due to the support of industry players as well as the fact that it is open source and free.

To retain their customer base and to gain further market share, PACE Applied Technology, Inc. has been exploring options to support KOMAND on Linux platforms. Competitors of PACE were claiming Linux support. PositiveEdge Technologies, Inc. was tasked with conversion of all Unix-based KOMAND legacy scripts to the Linux Platform.

Solution

PositiveEdge analyzed the existing system and decomposed it into four functional components:

The first two components were implemented by redirecting the data collectors to the appropriate sources in a Linux system. It was discovered that the formatting process used old Unix style procedures to implement the conversion. Related scripts in question were promptly ported to Perl for its ease of use and flexibility.

Legacy Unix scripts use commands that do not have equivalent commands in the Linux domain. Hence, code for emulating similar functionality was written in the C programming language, which solved the data collection problem but presented a new one. This procedure involved recompilation of the kernel - which may be routine for developers, but System Administrators are averse to its usage, due to the nature of the operation as well as the risk it entails.

The final implementation was done using Perl. This implementation avoids the labor of recompilation and runs as any other script. The print module just needed to reset its pointers that were duly done by adding a simple step in the usual customization procedure.

The legacy scripts used some deprecated features in C++ which were suppressed by some minor changes to the install files. Some additional headers had to be added to the source in order to ensure smooth compilation even in the latest environment of Linux.

The project also involved auditing database tables. The current product supports Oracle, Sybase and DB2 databases. The scripts to collect data from them were analyzed for possible modifications. Since these scripts were written in SQL and were divorced from the Operating System Internals, no changes were warranted.