Policy Server Administration Guide › General SOA Security Manager Troubleshooting › Policy Server Hangs after Web Agent Communication Failure

Policy Server Hangs after Web Agent Communication Failure

Symptom:

If a Web Agent goes offline during a Policy Server request, for example, during a network outage, and does not notify the Policy Server of the communication failure, the Policy Server continues to wait for the Web Agent data. The Policy Server continues to wait, even after the Web Agent regains network functionality and closes the connection to the Policy Server.

If many requests from one or more Web Agents are lost in this manner, the Policy Server can become unresponsive because the worker threads handling the requests are not released.

Solution:

Creating and enabling the SiteMinder Enable TCP Keep Alive (SM_ENABLE_TCP_KEEPALIVE) environment variable configures the Policy Server to send KeepAlive packets to idle Web Agent connections. The interval at which the Policy Server sends the packets is based on OS–specific TCP/IP parameters.

Consider the following when configuring the parameters:

• When the Policy Server must start to send the packets.
• The interval at which the Policy Server sends the packets.
• The number of times the Policy Server sends the packets before determining that the Web Agent connection is lost.

  Note: For more information about configuring TCP/IP parameters, see your OS–specific documentation.

To configure the Policy Server to send KeepAlive packets to idle Web Agent connections

1. Log into the Policy Server host system.
2. Do one of the following:
   • (Windows) Create the following system environment variable with a value of 1:

     SM_ENABLE_TCP_KEEPALIVE

   • (UNIX)
     1. Create the following system environment variable:

        SM_ENABLE_TCP_KEEPALIVE=1

     2. Export the environment variable.

Note: The value must be 0 (disabled) or 1 (enabled). If a value other than 0 or 1 is configured, the environment variable is disabled. If the environment variable is disabled, the Policy Server does not send KeepAlive packets to idle Web Agent connections.