CAWIS MDM - SWIMN MDC

System Profile

System Full Name	CAWIS Mail Distribution Module
System Full Name (French)	SWIMN Module de distribution du courrier
Business Administrator	Lauren McMahon
Business Owner	Jenny Young
Director	Philippe Ngassam
Subject Matter Expert	Civil Aviation Maintenance Team Original SME was Alexandre Bédard
Division	National Aircraft Certification
NTARS Code	CA60(?)
Source Location
Source Code Location	http://tfsprod:8080/tfs/civav/CAWIS-WAAU/_dashboards
Migration to DevOps
New Source Code Location (DevOps)	https://dev.azure.com/transport-canada/DSD-CIVAV Support/_git/CAWIS-MDM

Technology Assessment

Platform Type	Console
Database Platform and Version	Oracle 18c
Development Language and Framework	VB.NET
Operating System and Version	Windows Server 2016
Additional Dependencies	TC Mailer, RightFax, EPPlus (Nuget)
Authentication	None

Environment Access Information

ENV	UNC Content of both options confirmed to be identical on February 10, 2023	WWWFILES	URL	DB
DEV	\\tcwebscriptstest\Scripts\CivAv\CAWIS-MDM (Dev) OR \\ncrws514\Scripts\CivAv\CAWIS-MDM (Dev)		n/a as this is a middleware. The associated Mailing functionality is accessed via CAWIS	CAWISD
PREACC	n/a	n/a	n/a	PREACC_CA
ACC	\\tcwebscriptstest\Scripts\CivAv\CAWIS-MDM OR \\ncrws514\Scripts\CivAv\CAWIS-MDM		n/a as this is a middleware. The associated Mailing functionality is accessed via CAWIS	CAWISA
PROD	\\tcwebscripts\scripts\CivAv		/a as this is a middleware. The associated Mailing functionality is accessed via CAWIS	CAWISP
TRAINING

System Overview

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Good To Know

CAWIS MDM is a mission critical application. It is used to send aviation safety information on a national and international basis. Problems distributing the emails can generate an aviation safety incident.

CAWIS stands for Continuing Airworthiness Web Information System

MDM stands for “Mail Distribution Module”.

The Mail Distribution Module (MDM) is used to distribute PDF versions of Airworthiness Directives (AD), Civil Aviation Safety Alerts (CASA) or Aviation Safety Letters (LETTER) of interest to 5008 Owners and Canadian and Foreign Special Interest Group (SIGs).

5008 Owners can potentially receive the information by email, fax or by Canada Post. SIGs only receive the information by email. If the email to a SIG fails Transport Canada makes no further attempt to send the information to that SIG, and neither does the MDM feature.

Mailbox management

MDM does the following steps to manage Mailbox size as the Mailbox cannot exceed its 2 gig size limit otherwise replies (bounce-back messages) will be lost:

All processed messages are move to the MDMBounced folder and subsequently deleted at the end of the run
Using BCC, MDM sends one message to 500 recipients every 60 seconds. The MDM process continues until all emails have been sent. Concurrently MDM is checking for and processing any bounce back responses as follows.
- The responses in the inbox are loaded into a list.
- Each response in that list is processed and then moved from the Inbox to the MDMBounced folder.
- When the end of the list is reached all messages in the MDMBounced folder are deleted, freeing up the space.
- This entire process takes less than 15 seconds to complete.
- If the MDM process is still running (as it continues to send out messages every 60 seconds until all message are sent) then this cleanup process restarts every 60 seconds.

How-To and Fixes

See also. for detailed MDM repair information and history: MDM OUTAGES - BSD - Civil Aviation - Confluence (atlassian.net)

Access to the AAIR inbox

The following section, “General troubleshooting” provides an overview of the steps to take when investigating an issue with the CAWIS MDM Application. Links with more in-depth details about how issues have been resolved to-date, are also provided.

General troubleshooting

Contact list for the contacts mentioned below

Current update, Jan 2023 regarding who to contact:

Check the log file for the environment that is affected. The current The current log file is called “output.log”. They are located in the UNC locations listed in the Environment access information at the beginning of this document. The log files are automatically rotated when they hit a certain size. You may need to look in the “logs” folder if the problem happened a while ago.

The MDM inbox/account is called DNRENAC. Currently, it’s password is auto updated every 80 days, by the MDM process on the script server at \\ncrws548\scripts\CivAv\CAWIS-MDM. Again, log files in the “Log” directory will tell you exactly when the process began failing
If there’s no logs being generated => the task isn’t running
For support on the web application contact the web group for diagnostic or server restart.
For a production issue with the web application, open an ORION ticket to the attention of the web server group so that they can work on and document the issue.
If the process seems to be looping the same messages => One of the thread in stuck:
- You can wait for the deadlock-prevention timer (2hr) to kick in.
- OR contact the group responsible for the server to kill the task.
  
  Per Marcin on Jan 27, 2023: “the deadlock issues we had we back in 2020 and for those you need to contact Oracle dba group.”
If there's a message like “Application is disabled due to database configuration.“ => The application is disabled
1. In the TR47 table in the CAWIS database, set the configuration called “MDM - APPLICATION ENABLE” to “true”.
If there’s a message like “exchange server is unreachable.“ => The email account might be locked.
1. Open a command prompt and type “net user DNRENAC /domain“. In the response, you should get something like below:
  If the line “Account active” says “Locked” or “No”, contact the Service Desk for them to reactivate the account. To-date, most recently in Jan 2023, Robert Lang and Muhammad Duhabei assisted with this.