Troubleshooting Site Selector

Use the information that is provided to help you solve problems that can occur in Site Selector.

Click a link in the table to go to a full description and possible solution for the problem that you are experiencing.
Table 1. Site Selector Troubleshooting table
Symptom Possible cause
Site Selector not running correctly Conflicting port number
Site Selector does not round-robin incoming requests from Solaris client Solaris systems run a "name service cache daemon"
The sscontrol or lbadmin command fails with ‘Server not responding' or ‘unable to access RMI server' message Commands fail due to socksified stack. Or commands fail due to not starting ssserver.
ssserver fails to start on Windows platform Windows systems do not require the host name to be in the DNS.
Machine with duplicate routes not load balancing correctly - name resolution appears to fail Site Selector machine with multiple adapters attached to the same subnet
Unexpected GUI behavior when using Windows platform paired with Matrox AGP video card Problem occurs when using Matrox AGP video cards while running the Load Balancer GUI
GUI hangs (or unexpected behavior) when trying to load a large configuration file. Java™ does not have access to enough memory to handle such a large change to the GUI
On Windows platform, corrupted Latin-1 national characters appear in command prompt Change font properties of command prompt window
On HP-UX platform, the following message occurs: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError unable to create new native thread Some HP-UX installations by default allow 64 threads per process. This is insufficient.
On Windows platform, advisors and reach targets mark all servers down Task offloading is not disabled or may need to enable icmp.
On Solaris systems, Load Balancer processes end when you exit the terminal session window from which they started Use the nohup command to prevent the processes that you started from receiving a hangup signal when you exit the terminal session.

Site Selector will not run

This problem can occur when another application is using one of the ports used by Site Selector. For more information, go to Checking Site Selector port numbers.

[Solaris]

Site Selector does not round-robin traffic from Solaris clients

Symptom: Site Selector component does not round-robin incoming requests from Solaris clients.

Possible cause: Solaris systems run a name service cache daemon. If this daemon is running, the subsequent resolver request is answered from this cache instead of querying Site Selector.

Solution: Turn off the name service cache daemon on the Solaris machine.

sscontrol or lbadmin command fails

  1. The sscontrol command returns: Error: Server not responding. Or, the lbadmin command returns: Error: unable to access RMI server. These errors can result when your machine has a socksified stack. To correct this problem, edit the socks.cnf file to contain the following lines:
    EXCLUDE-MODULE java
    EXCLUDE-MODULE javaw
  2. The administration consoles for Load Balancer interfaces (command line, graphical user interface, and wizards) communicate with ssserver using remote method invocation (RMI). The default communication uses three ports; each port is set in the ssserver start script:
    • 12099 to receive commands from sscontrol
    • 10004 to send metric queries to Metric Server
    • 12199 for the RMI server port
    • 53 for sending and receiving DNS traffic

    This can cause problems when one of the administration consoles runs on the same machine as a firewall or through a firewall. For example, when Load Balancer runs on the same machine as a firewall, and you issue sscontrol commands, you might see errors such as Error: Server not responding.

    To avoid this problem, edit the ssserver script file to set the port used by RMI for the firewall (or other application). Change the line: LB_RMISERVERPORT=10199 to LB_RMISERVERPORT=yourPort. Where yourPort is a different port.

    When complete, restart ssserver and open traffic for ports 12099, 10004, 12199, and 12100, or for the chosen port for the host address from which the administration console will run.

  3. These errors can also occur if you have not already started ssserver.
[Windows]

The ssserver is failing to start on Windows platform

Site Selector must be able to participate in a DNS. All the machines involved in the configuration should also be participants of this system. Windows systems do not always require the configured host name to be in the DNS. Site Selector requires that its host name be define in the DNS to start properly.

Verify this host is defined in the DNS. Edit the ssserver.cmd file and remove the w from javaw. This change should provide more information about errors.

Site Selector with duplicate routes not load balancing correctly

The Site Selector name server does not bind to any one address on the machine. It will respond to requests destined for any valid IP on the machine. Site Selector relies on the operating system to route the response back to the client. If the Site Selector machine has multiple adapters and any number of them are attached to the same subnet, it is possible the O/S will send the response to the client from a different address than it was received. Some client applications will not accept a response received from an address other than where it was sent. As a result, the name resolution will appear to fail.

[Windows]

On Windows platform, unexpected GUI behavior when using Matrox AGP video cards

On Windows platform when using a Matrox AGP card, unexpected behavior can occur in the Load Balancer GUI. When clicking the mouse, a block of space slightly larger than the mouse pointer can become corrupted causing possible highlighting reversal or images to shift out of place on the screen. Older Matrox cards have not shown this behavior. There is no known fix when using Matrox AGP cards.

[Windows]

On Windows platform, corrupted Latin-1 national characters appear in command prompt window

In a command prompt window on the Windows operating system, some national characters of the Latin-1 family might appear corrupted. For example, the letter "a" with a tilde may display as a pi symbol. To fix this, you must change the font properties of the command prompt window. To change the font, do the following:
  1. Click the icon in the upper left corner of the command prompt window
  2. Select properties, then click the font tab
  3. The default font is raster fonts; change this to Lucida Console and click OK

On HP-UX, Java out of memory/ thread error occurs

Some HP-UX 11i installations are pre-configured to allow only 64 threads per process. However, some Load Balancer configurations require more than this amount. For HP-UX systems, set the threads per process to at least 256. To increase this value, use the sam utility to set the max_thread_proc kernel parameter. If heavy use is expected, you might need to increase max_thread_proc beyond 256.

To increase max_thread_proc, refer to the steps to increase the max_thread_proc parameter.

[Windows]

On Windows systems, advisors and reach targets mark all servers down

When configuring your adapter on a Load Balancer machine, you must ensure that the following two settings are correct for the advisor to work:
  • Disable Task Offloading, which is most commonly used on 3Com adapter cards.
  • Enable Protocol 1 (ICMP) for IP protocols if you are enabling TCP/IP filtering. If ICMP is not enabled, the ping test to the backend server will not succeed.

Refer to the section on disabling task offloading for instructions on configuring this setting.


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Timestamp icon Last updated: March 23, 2018 0:18
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