Filr inaccessible because CIFS based /vashare is no longer accessible

  • Document ID:7021107
  • Creation Date:18-Jul-2017
  • Modified Date:30-Jan-2018
    • Micro Focus Products:
      Filr

Environment

Micro Focus Filr 3.3

Situation

When Filr is configured for the /vashare disk to reside on a Windows server, it connects to the shared disk via SMBv1. If SMBv1 has been disabled on the Windows server, Filr cannot access the /vashare disk where Filr stores configuration and other data needed for a clustered Filr deployment. When this happens, the 'mount -a' command fails to mount the /vashare disk on the Filr application server(s).

Another possible reason for such failures could be that the Windows server requires NTLM Security Support Provider (ntlmssp) only.

End users may experience the following error when trying to access Filr on the Web (via browser):

HTTP Status 500 - Error creating bean with name 'sPropsUtil' defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/context/applicationContext.xml]: Instantiation of bean failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.BeanInstantiationException: Could not instantiate bean class [org.kablink.teaming.util.SPropsUtil]: Constructor threw exception; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: PropsUtil is a singleton class

The appserver.log from the Filr server will reveal the following errors:

2017-07-06 15:23:21,336 ERROR [localhost-startStop-1] [org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader] - Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'sessionFactory' defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/context/applicationContext.xml]: Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is org.hibernate.cache.CacheException: Unable to initialize MemcachedClient
...
Caused by: org.hibernate.cache.CacheException: Unable to initialize MemcachedClient
...
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: Shared config file '/vashare/filr/conf/memcached.properties' does not exist


Resolution

Possible solutions to this problem are as follows:
  1. Enable SMBv1 on the Windows server.

  2. Add an additional argument in the /etc/fstab entry for the /vashare so it uses sec=ntlmssp. The new line in /etc/fstab will look like:
    //<IP_Address_of_host-server>/<shared folder for filr>  /vashare  cifs  credentials=/etc/opt/novell/base/.smbcredentials,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,uid=30,gid=8,sec=ntlmssp,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

  3. Relocate the /vashare share to an OES server so it is a NFS Share as compared to a CIFS share (consult the Filr Install Guide on how to setup the shared disk). Updating the /etc/fstab entry for /vashare on the Filr appliance(s) will be required so that it is no longer using CIFS for the newly relocated /vashare as NFS share. It is also necessary to reconfigure the Filr appliance(s).

Cause

The Filr 3.2 appliance is built on SUSE 11.4, which includes the 3.0 version of the Linux kernel, which does not support passing a CIFS version to the mount command in order to force it to use CIFS/SMB 2, 2.1, or 3.
Also, by default, it does not use sec=ntlmssp which will be required if hosting server requires NTLM Security Support Provider (ntlmssp) only.

Status

Reported to Engineering

Additional Information

See also: TID 7015602 - The mount -t cifs command fails to mount an AD share if the AD server requires NTLMv2 with "Extended Security"