DEM Troubleshooting Knowledge Base Article

ISSUE

xg-portal service error messages

When an error is detected in communications between the client and server as seen in the error message shown to the user below, there are several scenarios that can cause this error.

xg-portal service error

Error in Asset Tag

When adding an appliance on the Configure->Distributed Appliances page, if the Asset Tag does not exactly match the actual asset tag of the appliance being added, the server can not communicate with the newly added appliance (client). You may see this is you add the appliance with an incorrect asset tag then attempt to manage the appliance by selecting the appliance and then clicking ‘Manage’.

To correct this make certain that the asset tag exactly matches the appliance asset tag. An optional way to add an appliance is to configure the client and force data to be pushed to the server (see section X.X of the User Guide for Unitrends Distributed Enterprise Manger].

Appliance is Monitored not Managed and Update Selected on Dashboard

If an appliance is being monitored by a server and the update icon is clicked this message will be displayed since it is not configured as being managed by the appliance. To resolve the issue configure the client to be managed by the server via the ‘mgportal.conf’ file on the client. Remember that a client can only be managed by a single server. Once the change is made the ‘to_cloud -c all’ command can be executed on the client to push data immediately to the managing server.

Error seen when changing managed server

If a change is made to the server that is managing a client, it may be required to regenerate the keys for the new managing server. Follow the steps below to regenerate the keys.

Step 1: Go to the directory where the keys are located:

# cd /home/mgportal/.ssh

Step 2: Remove the ‘.rsa.pub’ file for the server that you now want to manage the client using the following command as an example:

# rm 192.168.181.153.rsa.pub

Step 3: Restart the xg-portal service:

# service xg-portal restart

rabbitmq-server service does restart on server system reboot

If the rabbitmq-server service does not restart on system reboot, please check to make sure the following step in the installation process was completed:

# chkconfig rabbitmq-server on

xg-portal service appears not to run

After installation is complete the xg-portal service will start and if there are no servers configured in the ‘monitor_servers’ section of the mgportal.conf configuration file, the xg-portal service will exit. It will restart every 30 minutes to see if a server has been configured and if so will recognize the change and send the data to the configured server. After making changes to the configuration file you can restart the xg-portal service to pick up the changes immediately or wait for the next crontab check which occurs at each half hour.

Clients can be managed by only one server

A given DEM client can only have a ‘manage’ relationship with single DEM server. A given DEM client can have a ‘monitor’ relationship with multiple DEM servers.

Need to update the list of ports to include those for DEM

The DEM server will need to have additional incoming ports open if managing any DEM clients. The DEM client will connect to the server using port 5671 or 5672.

Users should be able to connect to DEM with security settings set to Low

The DEM server routes the connection to the UI on the DEM client through alternate ports on the DEM server. At this time, you will need to open incoming ports 10000 through 11000 on the DEM server as the route could be on any port in this range. In the next release, the number of open ports and starting port number will be user-configurable.

DEM Shows generic error when the appliance is added with any invalid asset tag

The DEM server can accept or reject status updates from DEM clients based on a setting in the DEM server’s mgportal.conf configuration file. The setting allow_unsupported_devices defaults to “existing”, which means that only distributed appliances that the user explicitly adds to the DEM server will be accepted. When adding an appliance, please take care to ensure the asset tag you enter is the correct one for the DEM client appliance; otherwise, the request will be rejected. If you change allow_unsupported_devices to true, and any DEM client with a valid Unitrends license and asset tag can send status to the DEM server; if the setting is false, only DEM client appliances that are covered with an active Unitrends support contract will be accepted.

Switching AMQP libraries when DEM client deployed in the cloud

When the DEM client is deployed in the cloud there can be disconnects of the connection between the client and server. This can be avoided by switching to a different AMQP library that provides heartbeat messages. The following steps on the client will install the new library, but the xg-portal-client must be installed before executing these steps. Once the steps have been completed be sure to restart the xg-portal service as noted below.
Step 1: Install AMQPLig’s php dependencies

# wget http://download.sipxcom.org/pub/centos/6/updates/x86_64/Packages/php-bcmath-5.3.3-27.el6_5.x86_64.rpm
# wget http://download.sipxcom.org/pub/centos/6/updates/x86_64/Packages/php-mbstring-5.3.3-27.el6_5.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -i php-bcmath-5.3.3-27.el6_5.x86_64.rpm
# rpm -i php-mbstring-5.3.3-27.el6_5.x86_64.rpm

Step 2: Install AMQPlib (which installs PHP Composer automatically):

# /usr/local/mgportal/bin/install_php-amqplib.sh

Step 3: Using AMQPLib, set “AMQPLib in mbportal.conf for client:

“AMQPLib”: true,

Step 4: AMQPLib supports RabbitMQ SSL connections, to use it, add to mgportal.conf:

“useSSL”: true,

if useSSL is set to true but AMQPLib is not true, the xg-portal service will fail.
Step 5: Restart the xg-portal service:

# service xg-portal restart