Activate: Troubleshoot
Common issues and best practices
Ensure that:
- It is customary to set all services as ‘Manual’ and allow the Activate process to manage these
- It is important that only ONE Alarm service is active at any time while, for the other services, both can be running.
- The IP Addresses for PeerStatusListeningPortRemote and PeerStatusListeningPortLocal are reversed in the configuration on the other server.
- For the UI, open the UDP ports 8012, PeerStatusListeningPortRemote and PeerStatusListeningPortLocal in the Firewall.
- If it is required for service on active server to always use the Share IP to make external connection, then set EnforceVirtualIP to true. The default is false.
Server State Unknown
When correctly configured and a fail-over has been activated then the passive server may show a state of ‘Unknown’ and the ‘Services’ list will be empty, not reporting on the status of the configured service.
The workaround for this is to connect to the server that is displaying the ‘Unknown’ state and to manually restart the Activate service on that machine.
The state will now appear as ‘Disconnected’ and the list of the services with their states will be displayed.
Logging
A separate configuration file is used to configure the logs. You can find the configuration file in the folder:
C:/Program Files (x86)/Sym3/Sym3 Activate/BCS.Sym3.ActivateService.log.config
The logging framework used with Activate is log4NET.
Note: It is possible to change the location of the log file or to set a different level of logging (debug, info, warn or error).
Failover Recover
If Activate services are in contradictory states or in error state, check the log file, available in the folder:
C:\ProgramData\Sym3\Activate\Log.
The only way to recover from an Error State is to restart Activate service.
IP Address Conflict
There is a special case where the failure of the ‘Active’ server will create a state where automatic failover will not be successful. This may occur if the active Activate service unexpected terminates prior to removing the shared IP address from its network adapter.
The server going to the active state will detect the IP address has not been released by the other server; it therefore goes into the ‘Error’ state, as it cannot successfully assign the IP address. This results in both servers not being operational, the conflict will be detailed within the log file.
To resolve this situation, the IP address on the server where Activate terminated can be removed manually (using the netsh command), or the Activate service restarted on that server. The other Activate service will also require a restart.
Due to the low complexity and built in fault tolerance of the Activate service, the possibility of the occurrence of this situation is low. It has only occurred during testing by actively terminating the service process.
State results
The Activate State result is available in the following OID of the Sym3HLC.MIB
OID 1.3.6.1.3.2.21.1.12.8.3.0
| State | Value |
|---|---|
| UNKNOWN | 0 |
| INITIALISATION_STATE | 1 |
| WAIT_COMMS_STATE | 2 |
| ACTIVE_STATE | 3 |
| ACTIVESTATE_EXIT_STATE | 4 |
| PASSIVE_STATE | 5 |
| GOING_ACTIVE_STATE | 6 |
| GOING_PASSIVE_STATE | 7 |
| ERROR_STATE | 8 |
| SHUTDOWN_STATE | 9 |