A question about load balancers and Terracotta clustering

[Mark Cairney]

Hi,

I initially had battles with getting Shib load-balanced too but I've had it happily load-balanced with Sun JVM 1.6.0.31, Tomcat 6.0.3.2 and Terracotta 3.5.2_2 behind our Citrix Netscalers.

One "gotcha" was to set up port 8443 as a raw TCP port- this initially appeared to be a replication problem like you are describing but what was actually happening was that the Netscaler was intercepting and munging the encrypted traffic on the back-channel port. Port 443 is a standard SSL port with no offloading. We do have session persistence on port 443 too just to be safe.


Initially we were using the IdP status page for our health check but this was resulting in servers not being taken out of the cluster in the case of problem so I wrote a couple of cgi scripts for the various health checks- happy to upload them somewhere if people think they'd be useful.

Hopefully this is actually useful information and Im not waffling on too much :-)

Cheers,

Mark

On 10 Jul 2012, at 02:52, Wessel, Keith William wrote:

> Thank you, Gentlemen. Chris, I'll go for a newer Tomcat and Terracotta to see if that helps. Was hoping to avoid upgrading Tomcat, but it's probably just as well that I do.
> 
> Yep, the first thing I did today after upgrading Java and Terracotta (6.26 and 3.5.2 using files I'd downloaded several months ago when doing some other troubleshooting that's unrelated) was rebuilt the jar.
> 
> We've got our heap at a good size in production where the clustering appears to be working correctly on rhel4. But we need to get to rhel6 as soon as possible for production which means confirming that all's happy in our test cluster, of course.
> 
> I'm not optimistic that a Tomcat upgrade and Terracotta 3.5.3 rather than 3.5.2 is going to solve this. So, perhaps the next step is console.sh.
> 
> Keith
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: users-bounces at shibboleth.net [mailto:users-bounces at shibboleth.net] On Behalf Of Russell Beall
> Sent: Monday, July 09, 2012 5:03 PM
> To: Shib Users
> Subject: Re: A question about load balancers and Terracotta clustering
> 
> On RHEL 6 I had to install the Sun JDK and use that instead of the Open JDK installation.
> 
> There was also a difference or two in the options, but those were not for making the connections work.
> 
> Have you rerun the make-boot-jar.sh under your new environment?  (I think you may have already said you checked that...)
> 
> Regards,
> Russ.
> 
> On Jul 9, 2012, at 2:08 PM, Wessel, Keith William wrote:
> 
>> One question as is seems our move to RHEL6 might have broken this. Can Russ or others tell me what Tomcat, Java and Terracotta version conbimations they've found to work? I'm wondering if it's time to update one or more of these.
> 
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list send an email to users-unsubscribe at shibboleth.net
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list send an email to users-unsubscribe at shibboleth.net
> 

/****************************

Mark R Cairney
ITI UNIX Section
Information Services

Tel: 0131 650 6565
Email: Mark.Cairney at ed.ac.uk

****************************/


-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.