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10 Posts
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4296
January 27th, 2009 07:00
TCP (UDP) / IP Centerastar 4.0.1 protocol description?
Hi,
we are currently updating Centerastar from 3.1.2 to 4.0.1. We have checked with EMC documents and our Centera SDK versions seem to be compatible. However, to minimize risk we would still like to test our Centera SDKs (bundled in IBM Filenet P8 3.5.x) with the new Centerastar version. In order to perform such a test I was told a central EMC Centera test instance exists which is available for such tests. The idea is that we would just have to link some of our Centera SDK's to the EMC Centera Box which has 4.0.1 installed to see if it works. Your reply turned out to be really helpful:
Hi Adrian,
We refer to the setup as "Centera Online Clusters" and you can access the list of available clusters, usage policy, connection strings and necessary PEA files here.
From the list of available clusters US2 is running CentraStar 4.0.1. please download the appropriate PEA files to test your application connectivity.
Thanks,
Zeeshan
We are now having an issue with our firewall and in order to allow our systems to communicate with the above mentioned Centerastar we would need a description of the protocol used for communication between Centera SDK and Centerastar using v4.0.1. Everything we know is that the communication takes place on port 3218 using the UDP protocol on the way towards centerastar. But how does Centerastar answer? Active ? Passive? TCP? UDP? Which port does it use?
Maybe a documentation exists or you could directly answer?THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
Best regards
Adrian
mckeown_paul
409 Posts
0
January 27th, 2009 07:00
Adrian
we lock down the telnet port, ssh will work BUT we do not publish any user accounts for customers to log in with. The Centera needs to be a tamper proof black box for compliance reasons.
Also you'll find ICMP is disabled so ping wont work, you will need to down load the centera ping utility to do this. There are some tools you can down load from this site which will allow some management of the box but again most management functionality is kept to our service personnel. Centera Viewer will give you some functionality that you can use
Paul
abens1
10 Posts
0
January 27th, 2009 07:00
Paul
Thank you very much, this helps us understanding the root cause & we are now investigating the protocol with logging switched on.
Another question: We've tried to telnet to Centerastar on port 3218 & nothing happend. Is this correct behaviour or should something pop up?
Thanks again & best regards
Adrian
abens1
10 Posts
0
January 27th, 2009 07:00
Paul
Thank you very much & I guess the information we now have should help us to get the test done!
Best regards
Adrian
mckeown_paul
409 Posts
1
January 27th, 2009 07:00
Adrian
The SDK uses port 3218 with both UDP and TCP. We do not have any documentation that describe the protocol but briefly the SDK uses UDP probes to contact the cluster whenever it is setting up a transaction. It uses UDP so that its probes do not have to wait for a TCP timeout. Typically it will retry a UDP probe after 6 seconds which gives it a much finer granularity that the TCP timeout.
If you run your application against your own cluster and enable SDK logging at the debug level then you'll see the protocol in operation, that should giveyou some idea as to what is going on.