GroupWise Monitor not starting agents

• Several servers are setup to use GroupWise High Availability (GWHA).
• The POA that was manually killed, shows up in Monitor as being unresponsive, however, the Monitor Agent is not starting the POA back up.
• Tel-netting to port 8400 shows connected but nothing else.
• GWHA, was configured correctly per documentation and TID#7010090.

Executed  netstat -patune | grep 8400 and found that that CVD was listening and established on that port.  We should actually see xinetd listening on port 8400.  Could not change CVD to another port due to it's importance on this server, so the GWHA port was changed from 8400 to another available port.  Change the GWHA port by editing the /etc/xinetd.d/gwha file.  Once the port is changed, restart Xinetd by running "rcxinetd restart".  Check the available port again with another netstat and found that Xinetd's GWHA service was now listening on the new designated port.  Tel-netting to the new GWHA port also gave us the expected user and password prompts.

When changing the port of the GWHA, it should be noted that a restart of the Monitor Agent and the GroupWise agents, that are dependant on the local GWHA service, may need to be restarted.  A restart may be needed so the Monitor Agent can retrieve new changes to the local services.  When the Monitor Agent starts up, it polls both the GWHA and MTA/POA for information, if the GWHA does not respond, Monitor retrieves the info from the MTA/POA on how to talk to the GWHA.  The MTA/POA will cache this info so it's possible that Monitor will get incorrect info if the port of the GWHA was changed after the GW agents had been started.  After the MTA/POA and Monitor have been restarted, the correct GWHA port should be given to Monitor to correctly take advantage of the GWHA.

When performing a telnet to a server configured for GWHA, not only a connection should be seen, but the GWHA should always prompt for a user and password.  It's important to close down the telnet quickly so as to not deny the Monitor agent access to the GWHA.  If a telnet yields a connection refused, the the GWHA is not listening or not started.  If a telnet connects, but nothing else happens, then it's likely there is a port conflict and that port is already in use.

CVD (CommVault) is a popular backup utility that is used with linux.  CVD is registered/listed on IANA for using port 8400.


For help and assistance in configuring GWHA please refer to:

TID#7010090 GroupWise High Availability not restarting the agents automatically
GroupWise 8 Installation Guide, Section 8.4.3 Linux: Setting Up the GroupWise Agents, sub section on "Enabling the High Availability Service for the Linux GroupWise Agents".