Perforce 2007.2 System Administrator’s Guide May 2007 This manual copyright 1997-2007 Perforce Software. All rights reserved. Perforce software and documentation is available from http://www.perforce.com. You may download and use Perforce programs, but you may not sell or redistribute them. You may download, print, copy, edit, and redistribute the documentation, but you may not sell it, or sell any documentation derived from it. You may not modify or attempt to reverse engineer the programs. Perforce programs and documents are available from our Web site as is. No warranty or support is provided. Warran- ties and support, along with higher capacity servers, are sold by Perforce Software. Perforce Software assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this book. By downloading and using our programs and documents you agree to these terms. Perforce and Inter-File Branching are trademarks of Perforce Software. Perforce software includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors. All other brands or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or organi- zations. Table of Contents Preface About This Manual....................................................... 9 Using Perforce? ...................................................................................................9 Please give us feedback .....................................................................................9 Chapter 1 Welcome to Perforce: Installing and Upgrading........................................... 11 Getting Perforce ................................................................................................11 UNIX installation..............................................................................................11 Downloading the files and making them executable .............................12 Creating a Perforce server root directory..................................................12 Telling Perforce servers which port to listen on ......................................13 Telling Perforce client programs which port to connect to ....................13 Starting the Perforce server.........................................................................14 Stopping the Perforce server.......................................................................14 Windows installation .......................................................................................14 Windows services and servers ...................................................................15 Starting and stopping Perforce...................................................................15 Upgrading a Perforce server ...........................................................................16 Using old client programs with a new server..........................................16 Important notes for 2005.1 and later..........................................................16 Important notes for 2001.1 and later..........................................................17 UNIX upgrades.............................................................................................17 Windows upgrades ......................................................................................18 Installation and administration tips...............................................................19 Release and license information.................................................................19 Observe proper backup procedures ..........................................................19 Use separate physical drives for server root and journal.......................19 Use protections and passwords..................................................................20 Allocate sufficient disk space for anticipated growth.............................20 Managing disk space after installation .....................................................20 Large filesystem support.............................................................................21 UNIX and NFS support...............................................................................22 Windows: Username and password required for network drives........22 UNIX: Run p4d as a nonprivileged user...................................................23 Perforce 2007.2 System Administrator’s Guide 3 Table of Contents Logging errors.............................................................................................. 23 Logging file access....................................................................................... 23 Case sensitivity issues................................................................................. 24 Tune for performance.................................................................................. 24 Chapter 2 Supporting Perforce: Backup and Recovery .................................................25 Backup and recovery concepts ...................................................................... 25 Checkpoint files ........................................................................................... 26 Journal files................................................................................................... 28 Versioned files.............................................................................................. 30 Backup procedures .......................................................................................... 31 Recovery procedures....................................................................................... 33 Database corruption, versioned files unaffected .................................... 33 Both database and versioned files lost or damaged............................... 35 Ensuring system integrity after any restoration ..................................... 37 Chapter 3 Administering Perforce: Superuser Tasks...........................................................39 Basic Perforce Administration ....................................................................... 39 Authentication methods: passwords and tickets.................................... 39 Server security levels .................................................................................. 41 Password strength ....................................................................................... 43 Resetting user passwords........................................................................... 43 Creating users .............................................................................................. 43 Preventing creation of users....................................................................... 43 Deleting obsolete users............................................................................... 45 Adding new licensed users........................................................................ 45 Reverting files left open by obsolete users .............................................. 45 Reclaiming disk space by obliterating files ............................................. 46 Deleting changelists and editing changelist descriptions ..................... 47 Verifying files by signature ........................................................................ 47 Defining filetypes with p4 typemap......................................................... 48 Implementing sitewide pessimistic locking with p4 typemap............. 51 Forcing operations with the -f flag............................................................ 51 Advanced Perforce administration ............................................................... 53 4 Perforce 2007.2 System Administrator’s Guide Table of Contents Running Perforce through a firewall.........................................................53 Specifying IP addresses in P4PORT...........................................................55 Running from inetd on UNIX.....................................................................56 Case sensitivity and multiplatform development...................................57 Monitoring server activity ..........................................................................58 Perforce server trace and tracking flags....................................................60 Auditing user file access..............................................................................62 Moving a Perforce server to a new machine ................................................62 Moving between machines of the same architecture ..............................63 Moving between different architectures that use the same text format63 Moving between Windows and UNIX......................................................64 Changing the IP address of your server ...................................................65 Changing the hostname of your server.....................................................65 Using multiple depots......................................................................................65 Naming depots .............................................................................................66 Defining new local depots ..........................................................................66 Enabling versioned specifications with the spec depot..........................67 Listing depots ...............................................................................................68 Deleting depots.............................................................................................68 Remote depots and distributed development..............................................68